A revolution in the treatment of children who are near death because of serious heart disease has kept most of them alive long enough to undergo a successful heart transplant, doctors reported yesterday.

Many children have died because a suitable heart was not available. The condition of some with hearts that may have been defective at birth or damaged by a virus can deteriorate rapidly.

Doctors at London's Great Ormond Street hospital for children and the Freeman hospital in Newcastle have found, through a five-year study published in this week's Lancet, that putting the children on machines to take over the heart's pumping function and placing them at the top of the transplant waiting list kept 77% of the 22 children in the study alive and well enough for a transplant.

It was thought that attaching children to external mechanical hearts and life support machines could cause damage from which it would be hard to recover. "Patients would be nursed in the hope that something would come along," said Martin Elliott, chief of cardiac surgery and director of transplantation at Great Ormond Street. "They would die and a few days later an appropriate organ would come along. We would feel so desperate."

Many donated children's hearts were being wasted, usually because of matching problems. Out of 257 donor hearts available from children under 17 during the five years from the start of 1998 to the end of 2002, 137 were transplanted and 120 went unused.

theguardian.com/medicine