CareDx Inc. announced the launch of AlloHome, a pan-organ patient monitoring tool located on the AlloCare app that can capture health data from the comfort of a patient’s home, according to a press release.
Patients who use AlloHome receive Bluetooth devices, including a glucose monitor and a blood pressure cuff, that automatically pair with a smart hub in the house. Data also pair with the patient’s AlloCare app. Read the full story in Healio.
Aldosterone is associated with an increased risk of chronic kidney disease progression and the development of end-stage kidney disease, according to data published in the European Heart Journal.
Further, this correlation is independent of whether a patient has diabetes. Read more in Healio.
In 2021, the MGH Transplant Center completed 43 heart transplants – the hospital’s third-highest annual transplant volume in the program’s history despite challenges driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. This success was reflected in this year’s Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients’ list of national transplant program outcomes, with Mass General having one of the best overall performances in the U.S.
“The transplant program has grown significantly over the past five years,” says Greg Lewis, MD, medical director of the Cardiac Transplantation Program. “We now perform about 1% of the international volume here at Mass General.”
Read more from Massachusetts General Hospital.
It was 422 days at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
That’s the length of Ashburn-area resident Colette Hurd’s stay due to her idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension, a condition that affects blood vessels in the lungs and the right side of the heart and causes the heart and lungs to weaken over time.
Read the full story in the Chicago Tribune.
Background: Decisions about organ donation are stressful for family members of potential organ donors. We sought to comprehensively explore the donation process from interviews conducted with family members of patients admitted to pediatric and adult intensive care units in Canada.
Methods: We conducted a qualitative study using semistructured, in-depth interviews with 271 family members asked to make an organ donation decision. We recruited participants from all provinces with an organ donation organization (n = 10), and analyzed themes using a modified grounded theory approach. On the basis of these interviews, suggestions were made by researchers and family members on how to improve the process of organ donation. Read the complete abstract from the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
A data report is available detailing the first two years of liver and intestinal organ allocation policy based on acuity circles. The policy was projected to increase equity and provide more consistent transplant access for the most urgent transplant candidates. Continuing trends as documented in previous monitoring reports, the findings in this two-year report support a number of key modeling predictions and demonstrate an improvement compared with the previous policy in many important areas.
Overall, deceased donor liver transplants under the new policy increased by 4.3 percent, or 632 procedures, compared to the pre-policy era. Read more from the Organ Transplant and Procurement Network (OPTN).
A new report on lung transplantation success rates confirms that Cedars-Sinai patients experienced one-year survival outcomes of 91.49%, an achievement above the national average of 89.46%.
The data-; compiled by the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients-; provides a hopeful prognosis-; and options-;for patients requiring the complex yet lifesaving surgery.
Read more in News Medical Life Sciences.
(SACRAMENTO) Do pediatric kidney transplant patients have better long-term outcomes when their kidney comes from living, biologically unrelated donors compared to deceased donors?
A new UC Davis Health study finds that they do. The study reviewed data from the Organ Procurement & Transplantation Network database from Jan. 1, 2001 to Sept. 30, 2021. Researchers compared the rates of graft failure (when the organ is rejected by the recipient) and death, as well as long-term outcomes of children who received kidney transplants from living related donors, living unrelated donors and deceased donors.
Read more from UC Davis Health News.
Salt substitutes consistently improved BP and lowered risk for mortality, CV mortality and CV events, according to a meta-analysis published in Heart.
“These findings are unlikely to reflect the play of chance and support the adoption of salt substitutes in clinical practice and public health policy as a strategy to reduce dietary sodium intake, increase dietary potassium intake, lower blood pressure and prevent major cardiovascular events,” the researchers wrote. Read more in Healio.
Researchers have successfully altered the blood type of donor kidneys in a discovery that could increase the supply of the organs for transplant.
The breakthrough has particular implications for minority groups, who often find it harder to find a match.
A kidney from someone with blood type A cannot be given to someone with type B, and vice versa. Read more in BBC News.