Almost 30 hours after my bilateral lung transplant, it was time for me to be extubated and take my first solo breath with my new lungs. My wife, Susan, was at my bedside, along with several nurses.
In a video of that day last July, you can hear Susan ask me if I’m ready to have the tube removed. I shook my head no.
But once the nurses removed the tube, an almost immediate calm came over me. I could breathe. Read more in Pulmonary Fibrosis News.
Officials have also been trying to determine whether the cases represent a new phenomenon or are simply a new recognition of one that has long existed; there have always been a subset of pediatric hepatitis cases with no clear cause.
cluster of cases of severe hepatitis, or liver inflammation, in previously healthy children, which date back to October 2021. Read the full story in The New York Times.
Living kidney donors with obesity are at less of a risk for hypertension compared with non-donors with obesity, according to a presentation at the American Transplant Congress.
Further, weight loss correlated with reduced hypertension onset, especially among donors.
Read more in Healio here.
A patient who underwent transplant with a liver that was preserved for 3 days outside of the body using warm machine perfusion was healthy and leading a normal life at 1 year, according to researchers from Switzerland.
The recipient experienced only minimal graft injury with normal bilirubin levels and a small release of liver enzymes within the first week after receiving the graft via ex situ normothermic preservation (peak alanine transaminase [ALT] 138 UL-1 and peak aspartate aminotransferase [AST] 309 UL-1), reported Pierre-Alain Clavien, MD, of University Hospital Zurich, and colleagues. Read more in MedPage Today.
The transplant community, HHS and procurement organizations need to work collaboratively to increase the organ supply for transplantation in the United States, according to remarks made at the American Transplant Congress.
“We need more than symbolic gestures from our elected officials if we are going to meet the crisis of end-stage organ failure that kills patients at a rate of 17 per day [on the waitlist] in the U.S.,” John Gill, MD, outgoing president of the American Society of Transplantation (AST), said during his address. Read more in Healio here.
We recently put out a call to the transplant community for recommendations of songs that have been impactful during your transplant journey. As always, you didn’t disappoint! We heard from folks across the country who shared songs and some brief descriptions of how they helped them through some time times. Check out their recommendations and see the complete playlist here.
Doctors in Switzerland have successfully removed a cancer patient’s damaged liver before transplanting it back into his body after having treated the organ in a machine for three days.
The multidisciplinary Liver4Life team at the University Hospital Zurich (USZ) has claimed that the procedure is the first of its kind in the world and they credited their in-house perfusion machine with making the feat possible. Read the full story in Newsweek here.
Although the development and use of biomarkers in liver transplantation has progressed in recent years, challenges and limitations remain, according to presenters at the American Transplant Congress 2022.
Thomas D. Schiano, MD, professor of medicine and liver diseases at Mount Sinai in New York, told attendees that among transplant patients, biomarkers should monitor short- and long-term graft function, predict acute and chronic disease development, assess donor organ quality or monitor response to therapeutic intervention. Further, biomarkers should have external validation. Read the full article in Healio.
Drinking a moderate amount — 1.5 to 3.5 cups per day — of unsweetened or sugar-sweetened coffee was associated with a lower risk for mortality, according to findings published in Annals of Internal Medicine.
An association between artificially sweetened coffee and mortality risk was less conclusive, researchers reported. Read more in Healio.
Organ transplantation is a very complicated medical procedure. The organ has to be compatible with the recipient, and the process also involves moving a live organ from donor person to recipient and maintaining the organ in working order until the surgery.
The traditional method of moving transplant organs involves storing them at a very low temperature. However, this process has a time limit and may damage organ tissues.
Read more in Medical News Today.