WASHINGTON -- Hearts from older patients, those infected with hepatitis and even deformed hearts should be made available to desperate patients awaiting heart transplants, U.S. experts recommended on Monday.

They said hundreds of people needlessly die each year waiting for a heart transplant, and those in the most dire condition are better off getting a less-than-perfect heart than no heart at all.

A heart transplant is often the only hope for patients with advanced heart failure, a chronic condition becoming more common in the United States. An estimated 5 million Americans suffer from heart failure and half die within five years of diagnosis.

About 6,000 to 8,000 patients go on a waiting list for heart transplants every year, yet only about 2,500 hearts become available for transplant, the panel of heart transplant surgeons, cardiologists and organ procurement specialists said in a report published in the American Heart Association journal **** Circulation ****.

Each year, about 17 percent of the patients on the waiting list die, and only about 39 percent of the potential donor hearts are transplanted.

The committee said transplant centers should relax some of the criteria used to choose hearts that become available for transplant after donors die.

"Implementing these new recommendations could increase heart donations," Reuters quoted Dr. Jonathan Zaroff of the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, who chaired the panel, as saying in a statement.

For instance, many centers automatically reject hearts if the donor is older than 55, but the panel found that higher-risk patients could safely use a healthy heart from such an older donor.

Many hearts also are rejected when ultrasound suggests thickening of the heart muscle, which makes the heart work less efficiently. But the panel said this problem also could be overcome if it is not too serious.

And patients with hepatitis infection can safely be given a transplanted heart from another patient with hepatitis, the experts said. The virus can be transmitted through donated organs but that is not an issue if a patient already has it.