Maria Contreras and Monica Davis share many things — including a vital organ.
The two Ohio women, who refer to themselves as “split-liver sisters,” received a liver transplant on July 1, 2020. But it wasn’t an ordinary transplant surgery: They had a split-liver transplantation, in which a donor’s liver was divided into two distinct portions, which were then implanted into each patient. Read the full story in The Washington Post.
Summer is just around the corner. The upcoming warmer months evoke images of outdoor activities and fun, and for the transplant community—the return of the Transplant Games.
More than 8,000 transplant recipients are expected to compete at the 2022 Transplant Games taking place in San Diego, California from July 29 – August 3. The six-day competition, hosted by Transplant Life Foundation, is expected to be the largest to date since the event’s inception in 1990. Read more on CareDx.com.
Recently reported study findings provide a detailed look at how a major adverse cardiovascular event (MACE) after kidney transplantation adversely affects survival and identify which patients are at elevated risk for MACE. Data also demonstrate that patients who receive a kidney transplant are at lower MACE risk compared with those who remain on dialysis.
In a study of 30,325 KTRs in England published in Kidney International, a MACE occurred in 781 within the first year of transplantation surgery. Read more in Renal & Urology News.
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You just found out you need an organ transplant. Whether it’s a heart, kidney, liver or lung, there are some key fundamentals to keep in mind as you navigate your transplant journey. Who better to share advice than those who have been through it?
Below are words of advice transplant recipients shared on Facebook and Instagram from their experiences during their transplant journeys. Read the full story on CareDx.com here.
Transplanting kidneys from donors who have the hepatitis C virus into patients who are HCV-negative is not associated with increased risk for early graft failure, according to a presentation at the American Transplant Congress.
“With the excellent outcomes of the new therapy of hepatitis in the last few years, we intend to examine the kidney transplant outcomes using kidneys from donors with hepatitis C,” Tarek Alhamad, MD, MS, the medical director of kidney transplantation at Washington University, told Healio. Read more in Healio.
— Tailoring care to nuanced circumstances is essential to better health
I recently saw two different patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus, both of whose hemoglobin A1c values were above the limit of detection of our point-of-care machine. My medical training taught me to treat them similarly: titrate medications, assess and encourage “compliance,” recommend home glucose monitoring, and counsel on nutrition and exercise.
But one of those patients was Ms. G, a woman who had residual weakness and visual impairment from a stroke and lived in a food desert. It was not possible for her to look at nutrition facts or a glucometer, access healthy foods, cook for herself, or walk around the neighborhood. Her dependence on loved ones made her feel depressed, ashamed, and useless, which contributed to poor eating habits. Read more in MedPage Today.
The use of infliximab in patients with a deceased donor kidney transplant led to increased infections and did not improve allograft survival, according to data presented at the American Transplant Congress.
“The intervention had no effect on allograft function or acute rejection,” Peter S. Heeger, MD, a professor of medicine and immunology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, told Healio. “Unexpectedly, we observed higher rates of infection with the BK virus, a virus that can contribute to graft dysfunction and graft loss.”
Read the full article in Healio.
Type 2 diabetes in kidney transplant recipients (KTRs) is associated with an increased risk for overall graft loss, with the increased risk due to death with a functioning graft, according to study findings presented at the 2022 American Transplant Congress (ATC 2022) in Boston, Massachusetts.
Vinayak Rohan, MD, of the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, and colleagues conducted a longitudinal study of 233,703 KTRs using 2002-2018 data from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients. Read more in Renal & Urology News.
On April 13, CareDx hosted a webinar to explore the future of xenotransplantation. Panelists included Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of NYU Langone Transplant Institute, and chair of the hospital’s Department of Surgery. Dr. Montgomery led the team that did the first human xenotransplant using a pig kidney. He spent 30 years at Johns Hopkins and moved to NYU Langone in 2016. Two years later, he was the recipient of a heart transplant, which gave him a fresh and unique perspective on the transplant journey.
Dr. Montgomery was joined by Michael Curtis, president and head of Research and Development at eGenesis Inc., which is working to scale xenotransplantation to help more patients, and Jim Gleason, National President of Transplant Recipients International Organization (TRIO), which serves as the voice of the transplant patient. Gleason is also a heart transplant recipient who is particularly excited about xenotransplantation because he believes it addresses what he called “the #1 unmet need in transplantation: the organ supply.”
This article is adapted from our webinar conversation, edited only for clarity and length. Read the full story on CareDx.com.