ST. LOUIS (KTVI) – A St. Louis man is alive thanks to an organ transplant team that persevered through incredible odds. That team had the task of transporting a pair of lungs through some very bad weather.
“It really felt like minutes to spare. It was very high stakes,” said Dr. Katherine Caldwell.
Read the full story.
During the first few waves of COVID-19, kidney transplant recipients in Norway engaged in less social interaction than the general population and strongly adhered to government advice, according to data published in Kidney Medicine.
Further, kidney transplant recipients reported feeling more concerned about infections despite living in a country with low infection rates. Read more.
In the early hours of January 7th, the cardiothoracic surgeon Bartley Griffith, unable to sleep, went to his kitchen to make coffee. It was about 2 a.m. His usual mug is tall, and he had to remove the stand from his Krups machine in order to fit it. “Next thing I realized, I had coffee all over the floor. I had forgotten to put the cup under,” Griffith told me. “You get a bit wiggly, a bit superstitious.” He asked himself, “Do you know what you’re about to do?” Griffith has forty years of surgical experience. But later that morning he was scheduled to perform a surgery that would be unusual even for him: the world’s first transplantation of a pig’s heart into a human. Read more.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Matt Rogers is a walking and talking miracle.
He says a COVID-19 diagnosis last year should have killed him.
“Apparently COVID didn’t like me at all. So, we just had a rough time going through it,” he remembered. Read the full story.
Cancer, infection, and heart disease are greater risk factors for death in kidney transplant recipients who die with a functional graft than organ rejection, a retrospective Mayo Clinic cohort study indicates.
“It’s important to have immunosuppression to protect people from rejection but we wanted to be able to say, ‘What are the other causes of kidney failure that we might be able to identify that help improve longer-term outcomes’,” co-author Andrew Bentall, MBChB, MD, a Mayo Clinic nephrologist, told Medscape Medical News.
At any given time, an estimated 15% of the US adult population has chronic kidney disease (CKD). It manifests as reduced kidney function to below 60% of its normal range (estimated glomerular filtration rate < 60 mL/min/1.73 m2) or by spillage of protein into the urine. The many causes of CKD include diabetes, hypertension, glomerulonephritis, and cystic kidney diseases. CKD is an irreversible malady with no known cure, and it invariably worsens over time. CKD is associated with higher mortality risks as it advances. If the patient does not die of cardiovascular or infectious events, end-stage renal disease ensues and the patient requires maintenance dialysis therapy or kidney transplantation to survive.
Each year, 130,000 Americans transition to dialysis, which is not only costly but also associated with poor health-related quality of life and an early mortality of more than 20% in the first year. Hence, slowing CKD progression and preventing or delaying dialysis can have major favorable implications for CKD outcomes. Read more.
A donor kidney from a patient who died of COVID-19 has been successfully and safely transplanted into a grateful recipient who, at 90 days, has shown excellent renal recovery and no signs of the virus, new research indicates.
The case report was published online January 13 in the American Journal of Transplantation. Read more.
By Katy Savage
Anthony Cosentino lay in a hospital with a pump connecting his leg to his heart to keep him alive. His muscle mass was gone and 90% of his heart had stopped functioning, but he remembers telling his doctors, “I’m going to ski again.”
Killington has been his go-to ski place since he was 5. Read the full story.
Scientists successfully converted donated lungs into “universal” transplant organs in a proof-of-concept experiment. That means, theoretically, the lungs could be transplanted into any recipient, regardless of their blood type, as long as the organs were the appropriate size.
In the new study, published Wednesday (Feb. 16) in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the researchers ran experiments on the universal lungs in an ex vivo lung perfusion (EVLP) device, which keeps lungs alive outside the body. Within the next year-and-a-half, the study authors plan to test such organs in a clinical trial with human recipients, Dr. Marcelo Cypel, the surgical director of the Ajmera Transplant Centre, a professor of surgery at the University of Toronto and senior author of the study, told Live Science. Read the full story.
Now, a new protocol being implemented at UCLA Health with select living-donor kidney-transplant patients is bringing that dream closer to reality.
“It is the Holy Grail,” says renal transplant surgeon Jeffrey Veale, MD, who has led the pioneering effort to develop the protocol. Read more.