Ventricular assist devices (VADs) have been used in the University Medical Centre Utrecht (UMCU) since 1993 to ‘bridge’ patients on the waiting list for heart transplantation (HTx) with deteriorating chronic heart failure to the actual transplantation after a matching donor heart becomes available.1 The Rotterdam heart transplantation centre also published about this technique.2 In 2001, the Utrecht group published results on exercise performance in 15 male patients with end-stage heart failure after implantation of a (left) VAD and compared the values with those after HTx.3 Three months after implantation of a VAD, exercise capacity measured by ergospirometry (VO2 max) was comparable with that three months after HTx: 23±4.4 ml/min/kg.