Patient Population
After approval from the Johns Hopkins Institutional Review Board, we
queried the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN)
database for all adult (>18 years) heart transplant
patients between October 1987 through September 2018. All data is
deidentified (no informed consent). We excluded multi-organ transplant
recipients, those without malignancy data (i.e. no post-transplant
malignancy entry to correspond to transplant entry), and those with less
than six months of follow-up. Among patients we identified who developed
a post-transplant malignancy, we excluded a recurrence of a
pre-transplant malignancy, squamous cell carcinoma, and basal cell
carcinoma.