Cardiac Allograft Hypertrophy: A New Target for Therapy, a Surrogate Marker for Survival?

It is clear that the long-term survival of heart transplant recipients is limited by complications associated with the use of immunosuppression or the development of transplant vasculopathy; therefore, their recognition and prevention may lead to improved survival. Allograft vasculopathy identifies patients at a higher risk of death; thus, clinical trials of new immunosuppressive drugs not only target rejection rates or survival but also aim to decrease the degree of allograft vasculopathy. In the paper by Raichlin and co-authors (1), the identification of cardiac allograft hypertrophy as an important prognostic marker for the development of allograft vasculopathy and survival expands previous observations that suggest that cardiac hypertrophy is an important clinical complication linked to long-term outcome (2).