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Mortality, failure rates similar in donors with high vs. low kidney donor profile index

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By Shawn M. Carter

PHILADELPHIA — Kidneys from adults with a high kidney donor profile index may boost transplantation access, but a multidisciplinary method can bring positive results in groups with low deceased kidney donor transplant rates, a speaker said.

“We treat patients in a predominantly Black community in Brooklyn,” where there may be less access to required medical resources, Fausto Ricardo Cabezas, MD, of SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in New York, told Healio of research he conducted with his team and that was presented at ASN Kidney Week. Read the full article in Healio.

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Daughter to mom who needed transplant at UI Health: ‘Don’t worry. I got your back’

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Raquel Ramirez shares her name with her daughter, so it was only fitting that one day her daughter would share a part of herself back with her mom.

When Ramirez got sick in 2021 and needed a liver transplant, her daughter, Raquel Regalado, who goes by Rocky, did not hesitate to be a living donor.

“They basically said, you’re in need of a transplant. We’re going to put you on the waiting list, but somebody can be a living donor,” Ramirez said. “She told me to my face: Don’t worry, Mom. I got your back.” Read the full story in UIC Today.

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Early kidney disease detection can cut down wait time for transplant

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By Kara Willis

HOUSTON (KIAH) — Over 37 million Americans are living with kidney disease. Once someone reaches the kidney failure stage, patients either go through dialysis treatment or wait for a transplant.

Sadly, there’s a shortage of kidney transplants and that is causing longer wait times for patients to be paired with a new kidney. Davita Horizon Dialysis says that nine in 10 people are unaware that they have kidney disease until they reach a more advanced stage or reach kidney failure. Check out the full story from CW 39 Houston.

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Kidney transplantation turns back the clock on renal aging

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By Tarun Sai Lomte

In a recent study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine, researchers observe that kidney transplantation (KT) mitigates the effects of renal aging.

Treating chronic kidney disease

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is an age-related disease and exhibits an accelerated aging phenotype. The reduced clearance of uremic toxins during CKD results in the accumulation of toxic solutes that contribute to endothelial dysfunction, chronic inflammatory burden, and increased oxidative stress. Read the full article in News Medical Life Sciences.

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Second person to receive pig heart transplant dies, Maryland hospital says

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The second person to receive a transplanted heart from a pig has died, nearly six weeks after the highly experimental surgery, his Maryland doctors announced Tuesday.

Lawrence Faucette, 58, was dying from heart failure and ineligible for a traditional heart transplant when he received the genetically modified pig heart on Sept. 20. Read the full article in CBS News.

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Three Binghamton alums make a life-saving connection

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Donor, coordinator and surgeon enable stranger to receive a kidney

By Eric Coker

For Arielle Disick ’12, donating a kidney in 2022 wasn’t about courage or charity. It was about simply doing something good.

“You never know how much of an impact that a little bit of kindness can make and what the ripple effects will be,” she says. “If you can do something to help, you should help.”
Read the full story in BingUNews.

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Diabetic Eye Screening: Reducing Frequency May Raise Retinal Risks

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— Switching from annual to biennial exams would delay diabetic retinopathy diagnoses, study shows

By Randy Dotinga

Reducing the frequency of eye screening in patients with diabetes from annually to every other year would delay detection of sight-threatening diabetic retinopathy (STDR) and proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR), according to real-world data from a multi-ethnic population-based retrospective cohort study.

Among over 82,000 patients with diabetes in the London area, diagnosis of STDR would have been delayed by 1 year in 56.3% of patients, while diagnosis of PDR would have been delayed in 43.6%, reported Christopher Owen, PhD, of St. George’s University of London, and colleagues in the British Journal of Ophthalmology. Read the full article in MedPage Today.

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Antibiotic Combo for Acute Infection Cleared of Kidney Risk

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— Use of cefepime meanwhile resulted in more neurological dysfunction

By Michele Sullivan

BOSTON — In adults hospitalized for acute infections, cefepime and piperacillin-tazobactam turned out to be equally safe in terms of serious kidney outcomes, although the latter antibiotic showed a lower risk for coma and delirium, an open-label randomized trial found.

Cefepime versus piperacillin-tazobactam for suspected infection resulted in no significant difference in the study’s primary endpoint, the highest stage of acute kidney injury (AKI) or death at 14 days (OR 0.95, 95% CI 0.80-1.13, P=0.56), Edward Qian, MD, of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, reported here during a late-breaking abstract session at IDWeek. Read the full article in MedPage Today.

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Donor’s Immune Cells Could Help Transplant Recipients Avoid Organ Rejection

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By Amy Norton, HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, Oct. 16, 2023 (HealthDay News) — A liver transplant can give people a new lease on life, but at the cost of lifelong immune-suppressing medication and its risks. Now an innovative approach to reduce, or possibly eliminate, certain patients’ reliance on those drugs is showing early promise.

The tactic is aimed at priming a transplant recipient’s immune system to better tolerate liver tissue from a living donor. A week before the transplant, the recipient receives an infusion of specific immune system cells from the donor — ones that, in theory, could tone down any immune system attack on the new “foreign” liver. Read the full article in U.S. News & World Report.

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How you can help shape the future of organ donation and transplant

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A message from Dianne LaPointe Rudow, President, UNOS Board of Directors

By Dianne LaPointe Rudow, ANP-BC, DNP, FAAN, President, UNOS Board of Directors

What’s going on

I’m a nurse practitioner by training, and I’ve spent countless hours with patients—both those waiting for a transplant and those who’ve just received one. I’ve seen firsthand the highs and lows, both physical and mental, that patients, living donors, loved ones, and family members of generous deceased donors go through, and one thing remains clear: Patients like you are at the center of the U.S. organ donation and transplant system, and it is up to us in the transplant community to engage with you and learn more from your experiences. Read the complete article from UNOS here.

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