Current Topics and Controversies in Pediatric Heart Transplantation: Proceedings of the Pediatric Heart Transplantation Summit 2017

Abstract

In October 2017, a pediatric heart transplant summit was held in Seattle—the first of its kind internationally—which focused solely upon controversies in pediatric end-stage heart failure management and pediatric heart transplantation. We selected five of the most popular and contentious topics and asked the speakers to provide a position paper. Worldwide, the vast majority of programs perform only a handful of pediatric heart transplants a year. Because of this, these “orphan” areas of investigation provide an opportunity for us as a community to aggregate our collective knowledge, which may represent the only viable way that we might sort through these complex and controversial issues in the field. We hope this represents the first of many such conferences and that this initial selection of papers encourages us to begin this collaborative process.