Vol 82, No 2 (2024)
Letter to the Editor
Published online: 2024-01-10

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LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Current practice of care for adolescent and adult patients after Fontan surgery in Poland: Heart transplantation. Author’s reply

Ewa Warchoł-CelińskaPiotr Hoffman
Department of Congenital Heart Diseases, National Institute of Cardiology, Warszawa, Poland

Correspondence to:

Ewa Warchoł-Celińska, MD, PhD,

Department of Congenital Heart Diseases,

National Institute of Cardiology,

Alpejska 42, 04–046 Warszawa, Poland,

phone: +48 22 343 44 00,

e-mail: ewarchol@ikard.pl

Copyright by the Author(s), 2024

DOI: 10.33963/v.phj.98873

Received: January 6, 2024

Accepted: January 6, 2024

Early publication date: January 10, 2024

Thank you for your interest in our article “Current practice of care for adolescent and adult patients after Fontan surgery in Poland” [1]. Indeed, we believe that a formalized surveillance approach for Fontan patients is crucial to providing optimal care for those patients. This approach should aim at preventing Fontan circulation failure and extending patient survival. We appreciate the positive evaluation of our efforts [2].

We would like to emphasize that our study aimed to evaluate the current practice of care for Fontan patients in Poland using a multicenter survey, and we did not assess the clinical data of Fontan patients or their treatment. We obviously agree that in failing Fontan patients, heart transplantation is both the ultimate, but very complex, procedure with promising results when successful.

We follow, with great appreciation, progress in the field of heart transplantation in failing Fontan patients in Poland, which in adults often has to be performed with simultaneous liver transplantation. We would like to congratulate the team from the Silesian Center for Heart Diseases for their pioneering efforts and for performing an impressive number of heart transplantations in this extremely challenging group of patients. We agree with the authors of the letter that an experienced transplant center should be an essential element in the network of coordinated care for patients after Fontan surgery.

Article information

Conflict of interest: None declared.

Funding: None.

Open access: This article is available in open access under Creative Common Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license, which allows downloading and sharing articles with others as long as they credit the authors and the publisher, but without permission to change them in any way or use them commercially. For commercial use, please contact the journal office at polishheart journal@ptkardio.pl

REFERENCES

  1. Warchoł-Celińska E, Mazurek-Kula A, Gladysz-Piestrzynska P, et al. Current practice of care for adolescent and adult patients after Fontan surgery in Poland. Kardiol Pol. 2023; 81(10): 960968, doi: 10.33963/KP.a2023.0178, indexed in Pubmed: 37537911.
  2. Białkowski J, Przybyłowski P, Hrapkowicz T, et al. Current practice of care for adolescent and adult patients after Fontan surgery in Poland: Heart transplantation. Kardiol Pol. 2023, doi: 10.33963/v.kp.98383, indexed in Pubmed: 38230490.