Stent medications help fight rejections; more recipients are over 65.

Massachusetts doctors told John Skalicky, M.D., in 1997 that he would die of heart failure within a week to 10 days. A student at Harvard Divinity School at the time, “I designed my own funeral,” he says. The doctors said he couldn’t be a candidate for a heart transplant because he was too old.

He was 72, seven years over the hospital’s transplant age limit of 65. But Dr. Skalicky was fortunate to have survived long enough to benefit from a major new trend just taking hold in the mid-1990s. His wife discovered that The Cleveland Clinic had no age limit, and had provided new hearts for a growing number of…

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