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How can you help?

You can make a difference between life and death for the growing number of people with heart disease and heart failure.

By supporting Heather's expedition and research, you will help raise awareness and provide critical funding into life saving research.

Your gift will provide the necessary funding to undertake important projects that will ensure that the Heart Transplant Program is always available for the many patients who will need our help.

Make a donation today

How we save a failing heart

Heart disease is the number one killer of men and women. What can we do to change this horrible truth?

Here at University Health Network, Dr. Heather Ross and her team are looking at why heart disease can progress into something more serious end stage heart failure.

Unfortunately, as heart failure progresses the outcome is often a steep decline in health and quality of life leading eventually to death. At the moment there is really only one option to save a failing heart a heart transplant giving someone a new start and a new life.

Heart transplant has its complications though, including finding the right donor for the patient and organ rejection. The biggest problem is the organ shortage everyone should sign their organ donor card!

What do we do now when a patient is dying and there is no donor heart? We save lives by bridging and supporting the patient using a mechanical heart, until a donor heart is available.

The mechanical heart pumps enough blood to support the body while patients wait for a donor heart. The longest a patient in Canada has had a mechanical heart has been 18 months.

We are also advancing research into an area called Regenerative Medicine. Regenerative Medicine is when you use your own tissues and cells or stem cells to heal and repair damaged tissues and organs. In the area of heart, there are two key areas of study: cardiac regeneration and cardiac repair.

We are also interested in looking at the physiology of patients who have received a heart transplant. We donâ™t assume that a heart transplant patient can do everything that they once could, so we need to do more research into the physiology of heart transplant patients to see why.

As miraculous as these options are there is still great room for improvement as well as the ongoing pursuit to discover new and better options to make life better for those that face serious, life threatening consequences of their illness. We also want to make sure that patients who do have a mechanical heart or who have received a heart transplant can lead, as much as possible, a healthy and normal life.

To do this we need to continue our research into the full spectrum of heart replacement strategies.

Your support of the mission will help advance research into replacement strategies for end stage heart disease as well research into making life better for those who have a mechanical heart and/or have received a heart transplant. We have organized our research into finding better and improved replacement strategies in two thematic categories Saving a Failing Heart and Making Life Better for Our Patients:

Saving a Failing Heart

• Mechanical Heart
• Heart Transplant
• Regenerative Medicine

Making Life Better for Our Patients

• Patients with Mechanical Heart
• Heart Transplant Patients

Initiatives that have been launched thanks to the generosity of donors to the Antarctica 2006 and Nepal 2008 projects include:

1. Salary Support for a Software Engineer to Analyze Human Langendorff Data for a Study on the Genesis of Ventricular Fibrillation
2. Salary Support for a Heart Failure Database Researcher
3. Support for 2 Research Students for the Informed Consent Education Study
4. Support for 2 Research Students Exploring the Impact Health Care Practitioners Have Towards Promoting Organ/Tissue Procurement
5. Support for a Research Assistant for Bioethics LD guidelines and consultation
6. Educational Support to International/National Meetings for Fellows and Nurses presenting UHN Heart Failure and Transplant Research
7. Support for a Webmaster for the Heart Failure Web Tool
8. Support for a Research Student Smoking Cessation Project
9. Support for 2 Research Students Heart Failure Database
10. Support for an Informatic Kidney Pancreas Cardiac Outcomes Study
11. Support for a Researcher Cardiopulmonary Research prognosis in Heart Failure
12. Support for a Researcher Grant Proposals

Thank you again for your generosity!

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