Posted on

Action needed to combat elevated risk for depression, suicide in diabetes

Loading

NEW ORLEANS — Risks for depression and suicidal ideation are higher among people with vs. without diabetes, and cases of suicide are likely underreported, according to a presenter at the American Diabetes Association Scientific Sessions.

Katharine Barnard-Kelly, PhD, chief science officer at Spotlight Consultations in Portsmouth, U.K., professor at the Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust and chair of the governing committee of the FDA Reducing Suicide Rates Among Individuals with Diabetes (RESCUE) Collaborative Community, said depression, suicidal ideation and self-harm are more common among people with diabetes than many people realize, affecting both men and women as well as all age groups. Read more in Healio here.

Loading
Posted on

Up to 1 in 4 adult survivors experience at least one long COVID symptom

Loading

COVID-19 survivors face a significantly higher risk than control patients for developing conditions affecting major system of the body, according to a study of nearly 2 million patients.

For example, up to one-quarter of people who have had COVID-19 experience at least one symptom of long COVID, the most common of which are acute pulmonary embolism and respiratory symptoms, researchers reported Tuesday in MMWR. Read more in Healio.

Loading
Posted on

Living organ donations save lives. This is how you become a donor

Loading

(CNN) Samira Jafari is at home now resting from a surgery that saved a life — not her own, but her colleague’s.

The deputy managing editor of CNN’s investigations unit answered the request for employees to be tested to find a donor for Senior UN Correspondent Richard Roth, who needed a kidney transplant, and found that her blood and tissue was a match.
Read the full story from CNN Health.

Loading
Posted on

CKD, Recent Transplant May Increase Cancer Risk, Study Finds

Loading

A population-based cohort study found that patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) or who underwent a recent kidney transplant had a higher risk of cancer compared with people with normal kidney function.

A study published in American Journal of Kidney Diseases found that the risk of cancer was higher in patients with mild to moderate chronic kidney disease (CKD) and in kidney transplant recipients vs patients with normal kidney function. Patients with kidney disease also had a higher risk of cancer-related mortality.
Read more in the American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC).

Loading
Posted on

Novel Type 1 diabetes treatment involves pancreatic islet transplant without the need for immunosuppression

Loading

In a new study, a team of researchers from the University of Missouri, Georgia Tech and Harvard University has demonstrated the successful use of a novel Type 1 diabetes treatment in a large animal model. Their approach involves transplanting insulin-producing pancreas cells -; called pancreatic islets -; from a donor to a recipient, without the need of long-term immunosuppressive drugs.

In people living with Type 1 diabetes, their immune system can malfunction, causing it to attack itself, said Haval Shirwan, a professor of child health and molecular microbiology and immunology in the MU School of Medicine, and one of the study’s lead authors.
Read more in News Medical Life Science.

Loading
Posted on

Older living kidney donor age may be negative predictor of recipient, graft survival

Loading

Compared with living donors aged 50 to 70 years, donor age older than 70 years may be a negative predictor of kidney transplant and graft survival, according to a presentation at the American Transplant Congress.

“I set out to see if the data and outcomes of a national cohort met my anecdotal findings that living kidney donor transplants from donors [older than] 70 years don’t perform as well compared to their younger donor counterparts regardless of measured donor GFR and noted that this had not been studied in a contemporary cohort in the past 10 years,” Adam Bregman, MD, MBA, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of nephrology and hypertension at the University of Minnesota, told Healio. Read more in Healio.

Loading
Posted on

A new storage technique could vastly expand the number of livers available for transplant

Loading

It allows donor livers to be held for days—significantly longer than the standard now–and even treated if they are damaged.

A patient who received a donated liver that had been stored for three days in a new type of machine that mimics the human body is healthy one year on from surgery, according to a study in Nature Biotechnology. The technology could significantly increase the number of livers suitable for transplant, the authors claim, both by enabling donor livers to be preserved for longer than the current standard and by making it possible to repair organs that are available but too damaged to transplant as is. Read the full story from MIT Technology Review.

Loading
Posted on

Returning To Work After Catastrophic Illness: Grace Under Pressure

Loading

Grace Rosenback had been enjoying her work as a presentation designer at an advertising company when her health issues took center stage. She was diagnosed with myocarditis in October 2019 and faced heart transplant surgery. She felt a lot of uncertainty about her future and what to expect.

Her journey through health and work issues included accessing her long-term disability (LTD) insurance, applying for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits, and eventually returning to work through the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) Ticket to Work program. Read the complete article in Forbes.

Loading