West Virginia to Start Heart-Lung Transplant Program

West Virginia University, which has identified 15 patients who left the state in 2001 for heart and lung transplants, is making preparations to start a heart-lung transplant program in Morgantown to serve what it contends is an obvious need.

But the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which along with Allegheny General Hospital has been performing heart transplants since the 1980s just over 100 miles away, is again publicly suggesting that more transplant programs may not be better.

University of Pittsburgh surgeons have for more than a decade fumed over the proliferation of transplant centers, contending that patients are not necessarily better served when the competition for scarce organs results in hospitals performing fewer transplant surgeries.

Dr. Kenneth McCurry, director of the Pittsburgh lung transplant program, one of the largest in the country, pointed out that lung recipients still do not live as long as those who receive hearts, livers or kidneys.

"The outcomes are still suboptimal -- worldwide, five-year survival rates following lung transplant are 45 percent, so there's still a substantial amount of learning to be done," he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "There is some value in having centers that have a significant volume of transplants that they perform every year, because that allows us to have our patients participate in investigative research."

Many transplant surgeons also suggest that outcomes for these complex surgeries on very sick patients are on the whole better at high-volume centers than at hospitals that perform a very small number of transplants.

But Dr. Timothy Hall, who directed the heart and lung transplant program at the University of California - San Francisco before coming to be the new surgical director for the West Virginia University Heart Institute, said neither quality of care nor research will suffer with the opening of a Morgantown program.

"The results we will have here will be equal to anything provided elsewhere in the country," said Hall.

Hall added that two more surgeons and a nurse coordinator are being hired for the West Virginia heart-lung transplant program.

Other Sources: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette