Comparative study of mouse heart and heart-lung transplantations

Heart transplantation in mice using a double anastomosis technique has become the standard method regardless of its technical difficulty. Heart-lung transplantation performed by single anastomosis in rats was also applied to mice, showing the identical operative result in addition to the advantage of easy applicability. We compared the heart transplant made by double anastomosis with the heart-lung transplantation using single aortic anastomosis in terms of graft survival and histologic features. The results were as follows: 1) During the follow-up period of 100 days after the transplantation in mice that survived 7 days after the operation, there were no deaths among the hosts and no evidence of nonfunction of the grafts in the six mice in each group. 2) In terms of monocyte infiltration perivascularily or interstitially, myocyte necrosis, interstitial hemorrhage, neutrophilic infiltration, and endocardial changes, histologic changes in the grafts were less in single anastomosis of heart-lung transplants than in double anastomosis. As a result, we can deduce that heart-lung transplantation using the single anastomosis technique is a good experimental model for the study of transplant reaction.