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One day on the field, admitted to the ICU the next: Rob’s liver transplant journey

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By Veronica Giarla

When you’re a teen, it’s not very common to worry about what’s going on inside your body — especially not about potential organ failure. For Rob, now 14 years old, that happened in the blink of an eye. One day, he was scoring goals in soccer and hanging out with his friends. But in just a matter of hours, he was in acute liver failure.

“Rob woke up feeling not himself,” remembers Rachel, Rob’s mom. “He had diarrhea, was lethargic, and was getting worse by the hour. By the afternoon, his eyes were turning yellow, and that’s when I knew we had to go to Boston Children’s Hospital.”
Read the full article from Boston Children’s Hospital.

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Local veteran uses second chance at life to bless others through bike donations

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By Sydni Eure

TONAWANDA, N.Y. (WKBW) — So you’re driving through Tonawanda and see a house with a few bikes out front and don’t think twice. That is until you then see some more bikes spread across the front yard. It isn’t until you you take a closer look and see that each bike is labeled with a number that you realize this isn’t something you see every day.

Well, Wendy Coyde, the woman who lined them up and labeled each and everyone says the process was as tedious as it looked.
Watch the full story from WKBW TV.

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UPMC Bridging the Great Health Divide: Pediatric Heart Transplant

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By WDTV News Staff

BRIDGEPORT, W.Va (WDTV) – Pediatric heart transplant is a highly specialized form of health care performed at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. Jasmin Adous tells us more in this month’s Bridging the Great Health Divide sponsored by UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

The pediatric heart transplant program at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh was the second of it’s kind in the world. Surgeons have performed almost 400 pediatric and young adult heart transplants since 1982. Dr. Brian Feingold is the program’s Director of Heart Failure and Heart Transplantation. He says the program’s success it due to it’s people.
Read the full story from WDTV here.

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Transplant Centers Often Skip High-Priority Candidates for Kidney Placement

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By Natasha Persaud

Transplant centers with discretion over kidney placement often skip candidates with the highest priority on the kidney transplant waiting list in favor of lower-ranked candidates, a new study finds.

“This introduces a subjective element into an otherwise objective allocation system with potential negative consequences for skipped candidates,” according to Sumit Mohan, MD, MPH, of Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University Medical Center in New York, New York, and colleagues. Read the full article in Renal & Urology News.

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Scientists successfully unfroze rat organs and transplanted them — a ‘historic’ step that could someday transform transplant medicine

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By Marion Renault

The rat kidney was peculiarly beautiful — an edgeless viscera about the size of a quarter, gemstone-like and gleaming as if encased in pure glass.

It owed its veneer to a frosty, minus 150-degree Celsius plunge into liquid nitrogen, a process known as vitrification, that shocked the kidney into an icy state of suspended animation. Then researchers at the University of Minnesota restarted the kidney’s biological clock, rewarming it before transplanting it back into a live rat — who survived the ordeal. Read the full article in STAT.

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AHA: Toxic metal exposure threatens heart health, particularly in underserved communities

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By Scott Buzby

Toxic metals such as lead, cadmium and arsenic found in food and water represent a significant hazard CV health in the U.S., particularly among historically underrepresented communities, according to a scientific statement.

Together, the American Heart Association’s councils on epidemiology and prevention; CV and stroke nursing; lifestyle and cardiometabolic health; peripheral vascular disease; and kidney in CVD issued a call to action to reinforce regulatory measures to reduce population level exposure to toxic metals.
Read the full article in Healio.

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Liver Transplant Outcomes Worse for Black Patients With HCC

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Contributor: Fnu Vikash, MD

While liver transplantation was less likely for Black patients with HCC, those who did receive a transplant experienced worse outcomes.

Black patients with hepatocellular carcinoma had lower rates of liver transplantation, as well as more complications and mortality when they did undergo a transplant, than other participants in a study of more than 112,000 patients, according to findings presented at the 2023 ASCO Annual Meeting.
Read the full article in Physician’s Weekly.

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Race-free eGFR for transplantation offers a more accurate measurement for recipients

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By Mark E. Neumann

A new race-free eGFR equation designed specifically for evaluating organ recipients post-transplant offers a more accurate measurement, a researcher said at the American Transplant Congress.

Marc Raynaud, PhD, MSc, lead scientist at Paris Institute for Transplantation and Organ Regeneration, told attendees that previously created eGFR equation measures used for transplantation have had limited success because they were developed for use on native kidneys, created based on U.S.-only patient data, which may limit their generalizability, and have shown suboptimal performance in measuring GFR in transplanted kidneys. Read the full article in Healio.

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Partial Liver Transplants for Kids Key to Preventing Waitlist Deaths and Improving Outcomes

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By University of Pittsburgh

Dozens of children die each year in the U.S. while waiting for a new liver. A new analysis led by University of Pittsburgh and UPMC physician-researchers suggests that greater use of partial liver transplants — either from a living donor or by splitting a deceased donor’s liver for two recipients — could save many of these young lives.

Published in the July issue of Liver Transplantation, the study found that transplant centers offering partial liver transplants, also known as technical variant grafts (TVGs), had fewer waitlist deaths than those providing traditional whole deceased donor liver transplants only. The findings suggest that more training, support and collaboration across centers to support TVG transplants could help eliminate pediatric liver waitlist mortality.
Read the full article in Newswise.

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Reanimated hearts donated after death work just as well for transplants, study finds

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By Elaine Chen

A new method of heart transplantation that uses machines to reanimate donor hearts from people who have died is just as good as traditional heart transplantation, a new study finds. If adopted broadly in the U.S., the procedure that could expand the donor pool by 30%.

The adjusted six-month survival rate of patients undergoing the new method was 94%, compared with 91% among patients who underwent the traditional method, according to the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine Wednesday, the first large randomized study comparing the two procedures. Read the full article in STAT.

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