Ryan Scoble, a long stick middie for the Mercyhurst University lacrosse team, thought he had to cut his career short after undergoing a heart transplant but he was determined to return to the game he loves with a miracle recovery. Watch the full story from NBC’s Harry Smith here.
By American Thoracic Society
Race-neutral lung function interpretation could increase access to lung transplants for Black patients with respiratory disease, according to new research published in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society online ahead of print.
In “Race-Specific Interpretation of Spirometry: Impact on the Lung Allocation Score,” lead researcher J. Henry Brems, MD, MBE, of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and colleagues investigated how race-specific versus race-neutral equations alter the lung allocation score (LAS) and the priority for lung transplant across races. Read the full article in Medical Xpress.
By Jeff Minerd
Letermovir (Prevymis) proved noninferior to valganciclovir (Valcyte), the standard of care, in a clinical trial of cytomegalovirus (CMV) prophylaxis in high-risk kidney transplant patients, researchers reported.
In a phase III trialopens in a new tab or window of 589 patients randomized 1:1 to receive either drug for up to 200 days post-transplant, the prevalence of CMV disease at 1 year was not significantly different in the letermovir group versus the valganciclovir group (10.4% vs 11.8%, adjusted difference -1.4%, 95% CI -6.5% to 3.8%), reported Ajit Limaye, MD, of the University of Washington Medicine in Seattle, and colleagues.
Read the full article in MedPage Today.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.