Heart Transplantation Survival Outcomes of HIV Positive and Negative Recipients

BACKGROUND: In the era of antiretroviral therapy, HIV-positive patients have reduced mortality from HIV infection and increased morbidity from end stage heart failure. The number of HIV-positive heart transplantation recipients remains scant. Long-term survival has not been rigorously studied. We compared survival outcomes of heart transplantation in HIV-positive recipients to HIV-negative recipients. METHODS: Clinical data from all adult heart transplantations were extracted from the UNOS Dataset. The impact of recipient HIV status was analyzed with Cox proportional hazards modeling, 1:3 propensity score matching and Kaplan-Meier survival analysis. RESULTS: Seventy-five HIV-positive recipients and 29,848 HIV-negative recipients were identified. Race distributions differed between the recipient groups, with Blacks comprising a larger proportion of the HIV-positive recipient group (46.7% versus 20.9%, p