|
About us
The Australian and New Zealand Cardiothoracic Organ Transplant
Registry was established at the first annual meeting of the
Australian and New Zealand Cardiothoracic transplant group in
Brisbane in May 1991. The relevance of the existing International
Heart and Lung Transplant Registry to Australasia is limited by
differences in health care systems and varying standards of
contributing centres. Consequently, the ANZCOTR aimed to report the
local experience, including data on donors as well as recipients,
for interested medical personnel and government. The advent of the
website now enables this information to be easily accessible to
everyone, including members of the public and patients.
An annual report (available in pdf and powerpoint formats) is
produced by June of each year and is able to be downloaded from
this site.
Data on new transplants along with updates relating to previous
recipients is continuously supplied by Transplant Coordinators at
the Alfred Hospital (Melbourne), Auckland City Hospital (New
Zealand), Prince Charles Hospital (Brisbane), Royal Perth Hospital,
Royal Children’s Hospital (Melbourne) and St Vincents Hospital
(Sydney).
The Registries main office is currently situated in the Heart and
Lung transplant unit, L4 Xavier building, St Vincents Hospital,
Darlinghurst, Sydney, Australia.
The Registry was funded by St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney up to
1997.
After this date, Registry activity was dormant due to lack of
resources.
Since 2003, the Registry secured funding from the Australian
Commonwealth Government Department of Health and Ageing.
Current Registry Director is Senior Transplant Cardiologist and
Heart Failure Principle Researcher Professor Anne Keogh.
Committee members are drawn from each of the six contributing
Centres and meet normally by teleconference at least once per
year.
Methods
A standardized data collection sheet for each individual patient
is completed by the Transplant doctors or Transplant Coordinators
of each transplant centre and submitted to the Registry (currently
located at St Vincents Hospital) for central analysis. Information
on each recipient include demographic data, survival, waiting
times, factors which may affect survival such as blood group,
gender, pretransplant symptom status, age, peak panel reactivity
pre-operatively and cross-match status with donor.
Information on initial immunosuppressive protocol,
histocompatibility with donor, and cause of death were also
recorded. Donor data included demographic details, ischemic time,
blood group and HLA typing.
At present, all data are entered into a specifically designed
cardiothoracic transplant database (P.Oyer and E.Dong, Stanford
University Hospital, California) running on a Fox Pro 2 database.
Actuarial survival curves are constructed by the Cutler-Edere
method and differences compared by Cox-Mantel testing. A p value of
≤0.05 is considered significant. Absolute data are presented as
mean (±standard deviation) and median values.
The Registry is currently designing a new modern database to
house Registry information, to be built using Filemaker Pro v8.5
and rolled out to all interested transplant centres. The estimated
time required to complete the database and rollout is late
2008.
|