OK, so Sam Prince doesn’t play in the NFL, but he’s come closer to it than many of America’s greatest prospects ever will.
Born with a severe heart defect, Prince’s chances of living for five hours, let alone five years, were grim, but through a combination of great medical care, good luck, and the abiding love of his family, he survived, and at eight years old had a successful heart transplant. Read the full story in Rowan Today.
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Four years after a major revision of the U.S. heart transplant allocation rules, deliberations are again underway on how to curb gaming of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) system.
The recent explosion in Status 2 transplant candidates with advanced heart failure would improbably suggest that “suddenly the entire country has sicker patients,” said Shelley Hall, MD, chief of transplant cardiology at Baylor Scott & White Health in Dallas and chair of the cardiac committee for UNOS. Read more in MedPage Today.
On Aug. 11, LifeCenter Northwest, the Organ Procurement Organization for Washington, and UW Medicine’s heart transplant team together facilitated the Pacific Northwest’s first donation-after-circulatory-death (DCD) heart transplant.
The patient, Ryan Stovall, 48, a resident of Beaver Creek, Oregon, is recovering well in Seattle. Read more from News Medical Life Sciences.
Having an organ transplant can feel like a new lease on life!
You find that you can suddenly do more of the things that you enjoy. However, new recipients are sometimes overwhelmed with all the requirements of post-transplant living. Read the full story on CareDx.com.
As a twentysomething fitness instructor, it was admittedly a little disconcerting for Kristy Sidlar when she passed out in front of a class she was teaching back in 1996. She initially chalked it up to not having eaten enough, but she was soon diagnosed with an arrhythmia, given some medication and told not to exercise so much. “That is the kiss of death – to tell that to someone who loves to exercise,” says Sidlar, who is now 53.
Three years passed and Sidlar, true to form, was training for a triathlon when she experienced another episode; she was riding her bike to the gym to swim and run, but she never made it there. Fortunately, another cyclist found her fading in and out of consciousness and called 911 (this was before the age of cell phones). Read the full story on CareDx.com.
The risk of arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death significantly affected medium and long-term outcomes in heart transplant (HT) recipients, who were a special and susceptible population. Data from the National Inpatient Sample from 2009 to 2018 were examined retrospectively. Patients who underwent HT or who have had HT and received newly implanted cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) were included in the hospitalization data (excluding the preexisting ICD). Read more in Physician’s Weekly.
A cardiac transport system for donor hearts was associated with better 1-year outcomes for recipients compared with traditional cold storage, according to new data from the GUARDIAN registry.
The analysis, presented at the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation Annual Meeting and Scientific Sessions, compared survival and other postoperative outcomes in heart transplant recipients who received a heart delivered with the cardiac transport system (SherpaPak cardiac transport system, Paragonix Technologies) with those whose hearts were delivered in traditional cold storage. Read more in Healio.
Having an organ transplant can feel like a new lease on life!
You find that you can suddenly do more of the things that you enjoy. However, new recipients are sometimes overwhelmed with all the requirements of post-transplant living.
Read the full story on CareDx.com.
A renewed interest in intravenous ascorbic acid, also known as vitamin C, could improve long-term success outcomes for patients undergoing solid-organ transplant.
Published June 11 in the journal Circulation, the study explores a mechanism for enhancing TET2 (TET methylcytosine dioxygenase 2) enzymatic activity with high dose injections of ascorbic acid. Read the full story in Medical Xpress.
Studies have shown that hearts and other donor organs are very sensitive to the temperatures at which they are preserved during transport. Temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius have been shown to have a negative effect on outcomes for transplant patients and potentially be linked to complications related to the viability of a donor organ for transplant.
Read the full story in The Daily Progress.