[Establishment of a novel abdominal heart transplantation model of mice]

This paper is aimed to establish a novel abdominal heart transplantation model in mice and to generalize the experience of the successful cases. The thoracic inferior vena cava instead of pulmonary artery was employed to reconstruct the outflow tract of the graft heart (in the new method group, 82 cases). Meanwhile, in other 47 cases as the control group, traditional anastomosis was used between pulmonary artery of the graft and vena cava of the recipient. The recipient surgery time, vena cava-vena cava anastomosis time, graft cold ischemia time and graft re-beating time were (41.5 +/- 1. 5) min, (8.4 +/- 0.6) min, (32.3 +/- 0.4) min and (1.5 +/- 0.2) min respectively. All the above data were statistically superior to those in the traditional method group (P < 0.001 or P < 0.05). The survival rate of 100 d post surgery in the new method group was 93. 9%. Meanwhile, the cardiac tissue remained almost normal examined by HE and Picro-sirus red staining. Therefore, the novel model can facilitate the anastomosis of the outflow tract in recipient operation in mouse heart transplantation model.