A decade of clinical experience with decellularized homografts presented at the 2015 EACTS

Researchers from Hannover Medical School, Germany and Universitatea Nicolae Testemitianu, Chisinau, Moldavia presented their clinical experience with fresh, non-cryopreserved, decellularized pulmonary homografts over the last ten years at the 2015 meeting of the European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (EACTS). To control for factors such as the well-recognized effects of age, type of underlying malformation and number of previous cardiac operations, they performed a matched analysis to bovine jugular vein conduits and cryopreserved homografts, which are currently the most widely used alternative options for pulmonary valve replacement. In this analysis, decellularized pulmonary homografts (DPH) outperformed both other valve prostheses and the authors concluded that DPH may be seen as the new golden standard for pediatric pulmonary valve replacement.

Figure: Freedom from stenosis for decellularized pulmonary homografts (DPH), cryopreserved homografts (CH) and bovine jugular vein conduits (BJV) in the matched study cohort and in the matched sub-cohort of patients with Tetralogy of Fallot.