Prolonged hypothermic cardiac storage for transplantation. The effects on myocardial metabolism and mitochondrial function.

Cardiac storage for transplantation is currently limited to 6 hours. To better understand the metabolic changes that occur during hypothermic (4 o C) storage, we monitored the morphologic and metabolic changes in the canine myocardium at 0, 12, and 24 hours of storage in University of Wisconsin solution. Attempts to isolate cardiac mitochondria resulted in a progressive decline in the yield (milligrams of mitochondria per gram of heart tissue), which decreased (p<0.05) from 9.2±0.4 at 0 hours (control) to 4.0±0.3 after 12 hours and further decreased (p<0.05) to 1.9±0.2 after 24 hours of cold storage