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LVADs—from an imaginative leap to clinical decision making

The development of left ventricular assist devices could be considered an 'imaginative leap'. In the current phase of critical evaluation of these devices, a study of patients who received first-generation left ventricular assist devices has indicated that they might affect late post-transplant survival. The validity and significance of these findings need to be examined further.

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Figure 1: Kaplan–Meier survival distributions after transplantation for patients who received an LVAD before transplantation and those who did not.

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Yacoub, M. LVADs—from an imaginative leap to clinical decision making. Nat Rev Cardiol 7, 246–248 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrcardio.2010.36

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