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Here’s Who Made This Year’s List of Top Hospitals

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— Top hospitals for 15 specialties, including cancer, cardiology, and orthopedics, also ranked

Cardiology & Heart Surgery

1. Cleveland Clinic

2. Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota

3. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles

4. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia and Cornell

5. NYU Langone Hospitals, New York

6. Mount Sinai Hospital, New York

7. Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston

8. Stanford Health Care-Stanford Hospital, Palo Alto, California

9. UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles

10. Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston

Read full article and see final list, here.

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Minnesota man’s kidney donation to a stranger helped national registry hit a milestone

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“A Minnesota man who donated a kidney to save another person’s life also set a record in the process.

Ben Rengstrof is a high school teacher with a mission, which started with a lesson learned after his father received a lung transplant two years ago.

“A kidney donation really isn’t that invasive of a surgery,” said Rengstrof. “And so I decided I had to do it.”

With the kidney donation, Rengstrof became an altruistic donor. He didn’t know the person receiving his kidney. He also didn’t know that he was making history.”

Read full story, here.

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Making allocation more fair and flexible

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“The organ donation and transplantation system in the U.S. has never worked better than it does today. Deceased donor transplants have increased for 10 consecutive years, and 26% more organ transplants are performed today than five years ago. But every day, we work to continuously improve and make the system even more effective and efficient to serve all of the patients waiting for a lifesaving transplant.

As part of these efforts, the organ donation and transplant community is working together to introduce a more fair and flexible approach to allocating donated organs to get the right organ to the right patient at the right time. Our policies have always been data-driven, but this new approach applies advanced analytic techniques to create an algorithm that makes every factor in the match run comparable.

Called continuous distribution, this new framework moves organ allocation from placing and considering patients by classifications to considering multiple factors all at once using an overall score. Doing so will dissolve hard boundaries that exist in the current, category-based system and ensure that no single factor determines a patient’s priority on the waiting list.

Read more, here.

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Commentary: Critical Elements for a Bright Future in Renal Replacement Therapy

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“Let’s start with a simple, tragic fact. Kidney failure affects far too many people. For the vast majority of human history, this meant a steady, irreversible buildup of fluids and toxins leading to an inevitable death. This is no longer the case today. Thanks to the pioneering efforts of scientists over the past 150+ years, millions of people worldwide are able to continue living with regular dialysis, and others—though far too few—receive transplants.

The story of how we’ve been able to get here, and the inflection point that the kidney disease care paradigm finds itself in today, is a testament not only to the innate desire within us to heal and alleviate suffering, but to the critical elements of curiosity, ingenuity and perseverance that are once again needed today, to recalibrate in a patient-focused way.”

Read full article, here.

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New Generation Artificial Heart Implanted in Patient at Duke – First in U.S.

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 “A surgical team at Duke University Hospital, led by Drs. Jacob Schroder and Carmelo Milano, successfully implanted a new-generation artificial heart in a 39-year-old man with heart failure, becoming the first center in North America to perform the procedure. 

The artificial heart was developed by CARMAT and has been studied in Europe, where it is approved for use. Last year, the company received FDA approval to begin studies in the U.S. to potentially enroll 10 patients with end-stage biventricular heart failure. The study will evaluate whether the artificial heart is a viable option as a life-saving step before transplant.”

Read more, here.

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Antibody Response After a Third Dose of the Vaccine in Kidney Transplant Recipients With Minimal Serologic Response to 2 Doses

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“Studies have reported low seroconversion rates (58% after the second dose) in solid organ transplant recipients who received a messenger RNA (mRNA) SARS-CoV-2 vaccine.1,2 Based on this evidence, the French National Authority for Health issued a recommendation in April 2021 to administer a third vaccine dose in immunosuppressed patients who did not respond after 2 doses. We examined the antibody responses of kidney transplant recipients who did not respond to 2 doses and received a third dose (100 μg) of the mRNA-1273 vaccine (Moderna).

Methods

All kidney transplant recipients followed up in the outpatient Kidney Transplantation Department of Strasbourg University Hospital between January 20, 2021, and June 3, 2021, with a negative history for COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 antispike IgG levels less than 50 arbitrary units (AU)/mL on the day of the first vaccine injection and 1 month after the second dose were included. All patients received a third vaccine dose between April 9, 2021, and May 12, 2021. The study protocol was approved by the local ethics committee and written informed consent was obtained.”

Learn more, here.

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CDC advisory committee voices support for immunocompromised people getting boosters

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During the last year and a half, immunocompromised people have been at extremely high risk for the virus. And for many, the COVID vaccine didn’t change that.

That’s why a group of independent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention experts at a Thursday meeting largely voiced support for allowing immunocompromised people to talk to their doctors about getting a third shot, a booster, that could increase their antibody response to vaccines.

Read more, here.

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FDA Approves Tacrolimus for Lung Transplants

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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the use of the transplant drug tacrolimus (Progaf) for the prevention of organ rejection in adult and pediatric patients receiving lung transplants. This is the only immunosuppressant drug approved for this patient population.

Tacrolimus has been routinely prescribed to lung transplant recipients for the past 15 to 20 years and is “the primary calcineurin inhibitor used as the backbone of immunosuppression for lung transplants,” Joshua Diamond, MD, associate medical director of the Penn Lung Transplant Program at Penn Medicine, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, told Medscape Medical News in an interview.

Read more, here.

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How organ transplants work

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“When a person needs an organ transplant, it is because one of their organs is working very poorly or failing. Undergoing an organ transplant can lengthen a person’s life and allow those with a chronic illness to live a normal lifespan.

Many people need an organ transplant due to a genetic condition such as polycystic kidney disease, cystic fibrosis, or a heart defect.

Infections such as hepatitis, physical injuries to organs, and damage due to chronic conditions such as diabetes may also cause a person to require a transplant.

Surgeons performed more than 36,000 organ transplants in 2018, but many more people need organs. In January 2019, more than 113,000 people in the United States were on organ transplant waiting lists. More than 2,000 children need organs.

The transplant process varies slightly depending on the organ, but the need for a matching donor is a consistent theme.”

Learn more, here.

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FDA advisory committee unanimously agrees donor liver portable system is safe, effective

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“The FDA’s Gastroenterology and Urology Devices Panel, Medical Devices Advisory Committee voted unanimously that a portable system for near-normothermic continuous perfusion of donor livers with perfusate was safe and effective.

The system will be prepared by hospital pharmacy and include compatible packed red blood cells.

The panel addressed three questions related to the premarket approval of the device Organ Care System Liver System (TransMedics). The entire 14-member panel voted that the device is safe, all voted that the device is effective and voted 12 to 1 with 1 abstaining that the benefits of the OCS Liver System outweigh the risks.”

Read more, here.

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