By Jane Bahk
All eyes were on 10-year-old Mason Patel. Nothing would start until he uttered those time-honored words.
“Play ball!” Mason called into the microphone, and the crowd erupted with cheers.
As this year’s Play Ball Kid, Mason represented organ donor recipients at the San Francisco Giants’ 24th Annual Organ Donor Awareness Day on Aug. 30, also known as Donate Life Day. Read the full story from Stanford Medicine Children’s Health.
By Enrique Rivero
People from socioeconomically distressed communities who underwent heart transplantation between 2004 and 2018 faced a 10% greater relative risk of experiencing graft failure and dying within five years compared to people from non-distressed communities. In addition, following implementation of the 2018 UNOS Heart Allocation policy, transplant recipients between 2018 and 2022 faced an approximately 20% increase in relative risk of dying or experiencing graft failure within three years compared with the pre-policy period. This is despite the fact that the proportion of distressed patients remained the same over both eras. Read more from UCLA Health.
Shawn M. Carter
Underrepresented groups with kidney disease face greater health care burdens due to psychological and structural factors, such as stigma and institutional racism, data show.
“Racial and ethnic minority groups in the United States are disproportionately affected by chronic kidney disease and progressive kidney failure, and face significantly more socioeconomic challenges,” Merav Shohet, PhD, of the department of anthropology, Boston University College & Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and colleagues wrote. Read the full story in Healio.
By Tanya Lewis, Jeffrey DelViscio, Alexis Lim
Xenotransplants could help to solve the organ transplant crisis—if researchers can get the science right.
Tanya Lewis: I’m standing on the rooftop of NYU Langone Health, a hospital in midtown Manhattan, scanning the sky over the East River for a helicopter. It’s New York City, so there are tons of helicopters, but I’m looking for a specific one. Read the full transcript or listen to the interview in Scientific American.
Routine monitoring of these patients urged to avoid serious health complications
By Lindsey Shapiro, PhD
Rates of metabolic and cardiovascular complications — from diabetes and kidney issues to hypertension and abnormal blood-fat levels — increased in the years following a lung transplant among people with cystic fibrosis (CF), according to a recent analysis in the Netherlands.
These findings emphasize a need for routine monitoring of transplant patients, its researchers noted. “Early recognition of these complications is crucial and will lead to earlier intervention, which could lead to improved prognosis after lung transplantation,” they wrote.
Read the full story in Cystic Fibrosis News Today.
By Isabella Hornick and Joseph Lasky, MD
Given the rarity of pulmonary fibrosis, pulmonologists are constantly seeking to know more about the disease and advance research on treatment options.
Two valuable resources for this research come from the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation (PFF) through its Patient Registry and Community Registry, the latter of which just celebrated its 1-year anniversary.
Read the full story in Healio.
By Emma Bascom
HHS announced the first 10 drugs that will be subject to Medicare price negotiations.
The Inflation Reduction Act, a law meant to lower health care costs for millions of Americans, included a provision that allows Medicare to negotiate the costs of prescription drugs. In 2022, Medicare enrollees who were taking the drugs chosen for negotiations paid a total of $3.4 billion in out-of-pocket costs, according to a press release from HHS.
Read the full story in Healio.
By Jeremy White, Pam Belluck, Noah Bassetti-Blum and Eleanor Lutz
More than three years after the start of the pandemic, many COVID-19 survivors continue to struggle. Some, especially those who became so severely ill that they were hospitalized and unable to breathe on their own, face lasting lung damage.
To better understand the long-term impact of COVID’s assault on the lungs, The New York Times spoke with three patients who were hospitalized during the pandemic’s early waves, interviewed doctors who treated them and reviewed CT scans of their lungs over time.
Read the full story from The New York Times.
By Shawn M. Carter
Psychological distress may be linked to poor self-management of chronic kidney disease, according to a recently published study of patients with CKD who were not on dialysis.
“Beginning with the diagnosis of chronic kidney disease (CKD) onward, patients are confronted with profound changes that require extensive emotional skills. An additional burden is adhering to disease self-management recommendations,” lead researcher Cinderella K. Cardol, PhD, of the health, medical and neuropsychology unit at Leiden University in The Netherlands, and colleagues wrote.
Read the full story in Healio.
By Scott Buzby
In patients with end-stage HF awaiting transplant, catheter ablation for atrial fibrillation was safe and effective and was associated with improvements in left ventricular ejection fraction and AF burden, a speaker reported.
The duration of follow-up was intended to be 3 years, but due to the number of clinical events, the trial data safety monitoring board recommended to stop the study prematurely at 1.5 years. Read the full story in Healio.