How does UNOS save lives?
UNOS matches donated organs with transplant candidates in ways that save as many lives as possible and provide transplant recipients with the best possible chance of long-term survival. Read more from UNOS here.
Interdisciplinary care was associated with higher odds of being listed for kidney transplant among patients with incident end-stage kidney disease in underrepresented groups, according to this study.
Further, researchers found interdisciplinary care provides better ESKD preparedness than the usual nephrology care in this population. Read more in Healio.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For recipients of kidney transplant who received an infusion of dexmedetomidine, early postoperative renal function was improved, according to a study published in Annals of Medicine. However, total vessel density was not greatly different between the intervention and control groups. Yu-Change Yeh, MD, PhD, and colleagues randomly assigned transplant recipients to a control group or dexmedetomidine group. Read more in Physician’s Weekly.
With the increase in life expectancy worldwide, end-organ failure is becoming more prevalent. In addition, improving post-transplant outcomes has contributed to soaring demand for organs. Unfortunately, thousands have died waiting on the transplant list due to the critical shortage of organs. The success of bioengineered hearts may eventually lead to the production of limitless organs using the patient’s own cells that can be transplanted into them without the need for immunosuppressive medications. Despite being in its infancy, scientists are making tremendous strides in “growing” an artificial heart in the lab. We discuss these processes involved in bioengineering a human-compatible heart in this review. The components of a functional heart must be replicated in a bioengineered heart to make it viable. This review aims to discuss the advances that have already been made and the future challenges of bioengineering a human heart suitable for transplantation. Read the full article in Cureus.