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What Is a Heart Transplant?

A heart transplant is a surgery in which doctors remove a person's sick heart and replace it with a healthy donor heart.

Transplants are done when a child's heart does not work well and they won't survive without a new one. Doctors sometimes call this heart failure, or end-stage pediatric heart disease. They usually first try to treat heart failure with medicine, surgery, or other procedures. If those don't work, a child might need a heart transplant.

Transplanted hearts come from organ donors who have agreed (or their guardians have agreed) to donate their organs when they die. They choose to donate the organs because they want to help someone else who is sick.

Many kids who have heart transplants go on to live normal, healthy lives after they recover from surgery. They will take medicines for the rest of their lives to prevent the body from rejecting the heart (when immune cells attack the new heart because they sense that it's foreign).