Abstract
We thank Drs Deutsch and Kaczmarek for their careful review of our article.1 As they note, we observed enhanced ventricular recovery in addition to preserved coronary artery vasomotor function with donor pretreatment with hypertonic saline in a porcine heart transplant model. They postulate that a mechanism to explain our positive results is the prevention of intracellular Ca2+ accumulation induced by extracellular hypernatremia. Furthermore, they present the results of 2 retrospective studies2,3 that examined the correlation between donor serum sodium levels immediately before organ procurement and primary graft failure and note that the lowest incidence of primary graft failure occurred with the most severely hypernatremic donors, although this did not reach statistical significance. Although we …
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