April is Donate Life Month. This is a perfect time to encourage organ donation.
I was introduced to the Center for Organ Recovery & Education (CORE) early in my nursing career. I told my family to donate my organs if ever there was an opportunity to do so. I have it on my driver’s license as well. Read the full story in the Tribune-Review here.
— It doesn’t help, for sure, but it doesn’t seem to hurt greatly either
SEATTLE — Perhaps the biggest downside of left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) for people with end-stage heart failure is the substantial risk of strokes they bring. But a new study indicates that patients can still proceed to successful heart transplant after an LVAD-related stroke.
Among patients suffering strokes after receiving LVADs as bridge-to-transplant therapy at one major referral center, and then proceeding to transplant, medium- and long-term outcomes were just as good as for stroke-free LVAD recipients, reported Aaron Shoskes, DO, of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. Read more on MedPage Today.
NEW YORK – Taking organ donor and recipient genetics into consideration — via a polygenic risk score (PRS) — may help identify individuals at risk of developing diabetes after a solid organ transplant.
“Our study demonstrates the importance, and the potential application, of PRS in solid organ transplantation,” co-first and corresponding author Abraham Shaked, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Transplant Institute, and his coauthors wrote in Nature Medicine on Thursday. Read the story in GenomeWeb here.
A unique lung transplant procedure has arrived at Northwestern Medicine in downtown Chicago
A unique procedure at Northwestern could cut down long waiting lists for those in need of a lung transplant.
Nicknamed “lungs in a box,” the ex-vivo lung perfusion procedure allows donated lungs to be examined for hours at a time on a machine – after being extracted from the body. The organs are then hooked up to a machine that simulates the breathing of a human body.
Read/watch the full story on NBC 5 Chicago here.
Transplant programs erect several bureaucratic roadblocks that can stall efforts by patients to obtain a kidney transplant, a speaker said at the National Kidney Foundation Spring Clinical Meetings.
“We need to get out of the rut created by the organ transplant system,” Eliot C. Heher, MD, founder of Square Knot Health Inc. and previously the medical director of kidney transplant at Massachusetts General Hospital, said in the presentation. Read more of this article on Healio.com here.
Simulations revealed that using deceased donor kidneys in transplant chains could increase the number of transplants by 290 a year, according to data published in the Kidney International Reports.
Further, investigators noted that using deceased donors (DD) can increase transplantations for blood type O kidney-paired donation (KPD) candidates. Read more.
Existing and emerging biotech advances are transforming the way we preserve and transport donated organs. While their methods may vary, all share a common end goal: saving more lives.
National Donate Life Month, celebrated every April, is here once again. It’s a time to acknowledge and encourage the gift of life that organ donation provides. Since the first successful organ transplant in 1954, countless lives have been saved through transplants. Just last year, surgeons performed a record number of transplants — more than 40,000, roughly 60 percent of which were kidneys alone.
But there are some 106,000 people currently on the national transplant waiting list and, with another person being added every nine minutes, this need outpaces supply. Every day, an estimated 17 people die waiting for an available organ. And lack of supply isn’t the only barrier to transplants; viability of the organs is another issue. Thousands of donated organs go to waste each year because they don’t reach a potential recipient in time.
Read the full story.
A baby girl who has been living in a Chicago hospital with her parents for the last six months while waiting for a new heart finally received one last week.
Elodie Carmen Baker received a heart transplant at The Heart Center at Lurie Children’s Hospital on March 27. Elodie was about 7 weeks old when she was diagnosed with a rare heart condition in August 2021 called dilated cardiomyopathy. She had been on the waitlist for a new heart for over 200 days. Read the full story here.
A kidney disease panel for 382 genes yielded a high success rate and was effective in identifying monogenic variants underlying inherited kidney diseases, according to data published in the American Journal of Nephrology.
“Recently, Natera Inc. developed a next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based broad panel test for the identification of monogenic causes of chronic kidney disease. This panel encompasses genes associated with disorders spanning multiple types of kidney diseases, including cystic, tubulointerstitial, glomerular, tubular and structural disorders,” Anthony J. Bleyer, MD, from Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston Salem, South Carolina, and colleagues wrote. Read more.
A Flagstaff woman was reluctant to ask for a kidney donation because she didn’t feel worthy. Eventually she did ask. And rather than feeling guilty, she was surprised by how grateful she now is. Continue reading or listen to this story here.