Introduction: Cardiac allograft vasculopathy (CAV) is a relatively frequent complication after heart transplantation which limits long-term patient survival. CAV development and progression is related to enhanced platelet reactivity (PR). (1, 2) We sought to investigate the correlation between pretransplant PR level and CAV development 12 months after heart transplantation.

Patients and Methods: We measured pretransplant PR of 48 patient using point of care platelet function testing device Multiplate. ADP was used as aggregation agonist. We compared PR levels patients who had CAV and patients without sings of CAV on coronary angiography 12 months after heart transplantation.

Results: Five patients (10.4%) developed CAV after 12 months. Mean PR was 517 AUC (SD ± 178) and 488 AUC (SD ± 230) in patients with and without sings of CAV, respectively. There was no statistically significant difference in PR between the study groups (p=0.79).

Conclusion: Our results show that baseline PR before transplantation is not linked with CAV development one year after heart transplantation. These results warrant further investigation on larger number of patients using other platelet activation agonists as well. Recipient reaction on donor heart changes with time. It would be reasonable to measure temporal PR changes to evaluate this parameter’s usefulness to predict or indicate CAV development.