Oct. 18, 2022 – On a warm summer day in June, Amy Nadel sat in a waiting room at Johns Hopkins as one of her children was coming out of the operating room and another was preparing go in. And in a similar room in another part of the hospital, another family was sitting through the same thing. They were linked not by coincidence, but by one life-saving thing they were about to trade: kidneys. Read the full story in WedMD.
Adults with type 2 diabetes and a BMI of 21 kg/m2 to 27 kg/m2 have high likelihood of diabetes remission if they lose 10% of their starting weight, researchers reported.
“Type 2 diabetes is often considered to be ‘caused’ by a higher body mass index, and certainly there is a strong link between increasing weight, increasing BMI and the incidence of type 2 diabetes,” Alison C. Barnes, RD, lead research associate and dietitian at the Human Nutrition Research Centre at Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K., said during a presentation at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes annual meeting. Read more in Healio.
Undergoing any surgery puts you at greater risk for infection. But with kidney transplants, you are often at even higher risk of infection from a range of viruses and bacteria, known as pathogens, because the medications you take afterward affect your immune system.
“Medications suppress your immune system so you will not reject the new kidney,” says Nikhil Agrawal, MD, a nephrologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “This makes it harder for your body to fight off a viral or bacterial infection.”
Read the full story on CareDx.com.
A recent The Annals of Thoracic Surgery journal study reports that the survival rate of lung transplant (LT) recipients who experienced respiratory failure following infection with the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was not significantly different than the survival rates among patients who received an LT due to other lung etiologies. Read more in News Medical Life Sciences.
Sethan Wilder’s cardiovascular issues began early in life and continued for many years until a heart transplant was his only option.
When Sethan Wilder heard the heart he had been waiting for was available, the range of emotions he’d been feeling in the months prior seemed to all come back at once.
“Not just the news that I was in need of a heart transplant, but that I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to have a heart transplant,” the 28-year-old said. “I can’t say the news made me happy or sad necessarily, if anything it made me eager to take on this new challenge and all that comes with it. Read the full story in Michigan Health.
Transplant-eligible patients with kidney failure should not be denied a kidney transplant based on their age, according to investigators in Austria.
They based that conclusion on a study of 4445 patients on a kidney transplant waiting list for their first single-organ deceased-donor kidney. Of these, 3621 (81.5%) received a kidney transplant and 1392 (31.3%) died. Read more in Renal & Urology News.
More than half of hospitalized adults with HF have obstructive sleep apnea or central sleep apnea, with male sex, higher BMI, higher heart rate and more comorbidities predicting sleep-disordered breathing, researchers reported.
“Considering the frequent co‐occurrence of sleep-disordered breathing in HF and its adverse prognosis, early diagnosis and treatment of sleep-disordered breathing may be beneficial,” Jian Zhang, MD, PhD, FACC, FESC, director of the Heart Failure Center at Fuwai Hospital in Beijing, and colleagues wrote in Clinical Cardiology. Read more in Healio.
During a television interview on September 18, everyone heard President Biden say “the pandemic is over.” Healthcare workers want this to be true as much as anyone else, but is it?
After 2 and a half years, we have certainly come a long way. First, we learned about how to best care for patients with COVID-19. Then, we developed multiple therapeutics to treat the infection. And perhaps most importantly, we have administered more than 12 billion COVID-19 vaccinations worldwide to prevent serious disease and death.
Read more in MedPage Today.
The games are really not about medals. They are about finding your tribe as a transplant recipient or living donor.
Calvet, Ph.D., is the CEO of Blue Tiger, vice president of Team Southern California on the Transplant Games of America board and author of “My Life in Stitches — Everything You Wanted to Know About Transplant But Were Afraid to Ask,” coming out in 2023. She lives in San Diego.
When Jeff Traegeser, interim president of the San Diego nonprofit Lifesharing, stood before the Transplant Games of America crowd during the opening ceremony at the San Diego Convention Center on July 29, he eloquently shared his thoughts. Read more in the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Although survival benefits for patients who received a kidney transplant varied, the benefits of kidney transplants were greater for all patients when compared with long-term dialysis.
All patients who are eligible for a kidney transplant should be able to participate in a transplant program because receiving a kidney transplant was demonstrated to be associated with increased survival compared to long-term dialysis, according to the authors of a recent study published in JAMA Network Open. The study is considered a pioneer in quantifying survival benefit through the use of restricted mean survival time (RMST). Read the full story in Pharmacy Times.