Heart Transplant in a Young Man With Schizophrenia

There is, so far as we know, no literature on the outcome of heart transplants in patients with schizophrenia. In fact, having a diagnosis of schizophrenia is an automatic exclusion criterion for heart transplant in the majority of transplant programs worldwide. Here we present the case of a young man with schizophrenia who was initially denied a heart transplant because of assumptions about his psychiatric vulnerability, his ability to communicate, and his likelihood of complying with complex posttransplant treatment. There was little objective information to support these assumptions, and this article describes how we brought this case before the ethics committee of the hospital and succeeded in overturning the initial rejection. We also describe the subsequent successful medical and psychiatric outcomes of the heart transplant operation. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]