Physiologic Assessment of Microvascular Function and Its Impact on Cardiac Allograft Vasculopathy in Heart Transplant Patients: Prospective Registry and Pilot Study

Cardiac allograft vasculopathy (CAV) or acute cellular rejection (ACR) are a leading cause of mortality and morbidity in heart transplant recipients. Most of the cases occur within 5 years after transplant and later incidence was known to be infrequent.

Mechanisms of CAV or ACR are thought to be multi-factorial involving both immunologic and non-immunologic factors that leads to injury of coronary endothelium and intimal hyperplasia. This unique mechanism results in long, diffuse and concentric stenosis of coronary arteries, different from those with conventional coronary atherosclerosis.

Due to lack of typical ischemic symptoms by denervated heart, diagnosis of CAV depends on routine screening tests rather than symptom based investigation. International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT) guideline recommends annual or biannual coronary angiography screening until 5 years after transplant, but sensitivity of coronary angiography is limited because of diffuse involvement of all segments of coronary arteries. Alternatively, Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) is a current standard for diagnosis and prognostication of CAV. It is well studied that progressive intimal thickening during the first year after transplant predicts future incidence of CAV and poor prognosis. However, the use of IVUS in the diagnosis of CAV is not generalized due to technical issues, high cost, procedure complications and ISHLT guideline states it is an option to exclude donor coronary artery disease, to detect rapidly progressive CAV, and provide prognostic information.

Recent development of single guidewire thermodilution technique enabled simple way to measure microvascular indices such as FFR, CFR, IMR. Our previous study shows, in patients with ischemic heart disease, presence of microvascular disease defined by low CFR and high IMR, predicts poor prognosis even without apparent epicardial disease. Considering its mechanism to involve diffuse coronary vasculature, CAV is believed to affect microvascular circulation in the early phase and spread to epicardial disease in its course. For this reason, by evaluating coronary physiology early after transplant, it may be possible to predict future progression of CAV.

There were previous studies which evaluated microvascular dysfunction in heart transplant patients. These studies indicated microvascular dysfunction at time of transplantation is related to progression of epicardial disease during first year after transplant, but lack of follow up prohibited from drawing any conclusion on occurrence of CAV later on. Another study by the same group evaluated microvascular dysfunction at 1 year after transplant and revealed it was associated with allograft vasculopathy at 5 years after transplant. However, this study did not evaluate impact of earlier assessments of microvascular dysfunction at time of transplantation on occurrence of CAV.