By Eduardo Cuevas
Evan Dame lives in near-constant fear his body will reject his transplanted kidney.
For a time, a simple blood test from the comfort of the 39-year-old’s Maryland home just outside of Washington would assuage that fear. He’d get the test every two to three months at 6 a.m., just before he started work as a facilities manager. Read the article in
USA Today.
9News
Every nine minutes, a name is added to the waiting list for a life-saving organ transplant. The American Transplant Foundation is working to solve this crisis. Watch the story in 9News here.
By Brittany Magelssen
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted organ transplants in unprecedented ways. Many transplant centers considered slowing down and even pausing all transplants, mostly due to the potential risk of COVID-19 to organ donors, transplant recipients and care providers.
In a study published in the May 2023 special issue of Production and Operations Management on managing pandemics, two operations management researchers from The University of Texas at Dallas analyzed the impact of pausing transplants on patient outcomes.
Read the complete article from The University of Texas at Dallas.
The number of U.S. residents on the waiting list for a lifesaving organ transplant totaled 105,960 men, women and children as of late May, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the nonprofit group that manages the nation’s transplant system under contract with the federal government. On average, 17 people die each day while waiting for an organ transplant.
In 2021, 41,354 transplants were done, with organs from 20,401 donors, including both deceased and living donors. Kidneys are the most frequently transplanted organ, followed by the liver, heart, lungs, pancreas and intestines. Kidneys accounted for more than half of transplants performed last year (24,670) and represent the organ needed by more than 80 percent of those on the waiting list. Read the complete story in The Washington Post.
Early success with a procedure called a mitochondrial transplant offers a glimmer of hope for people fighting for survival after heart attack, stroke, and more.
If you saw six-year-old Avery in her dance class today, you’d never guess that she almost died from a heart defect. She underwent her first open heart surgery shortly after birth, and the procedure left much of her heart damaged. After two months in the hospital, she was deemed healthy enough to go home. But her mum, Jess Blias, rushed her back a few weeks later because Avery had “turned blue.” Her heart was only pumping at half its capacity, and she needed another surgery. Read more.
The brain-organ connection is complex. Here’s what surgeons look for before, during and after a transplantation.
Livers outnumber people in Catherine Kling’s operating room at the University of Washington Medical Center. On this particular day, the extra organ — the only one ex-vivo, cleaned and sitting on ice — arrived just hours before the transplantation, the culmination of a thoughtful and time-consuming process of diagnoses, donor locating, evaluations and transportation, all sequenced by many expert pairs of eyes and hands. Read more.
An antibiotic stewardship program led to fewer Clostridioides difficile (C. diff) tests ordered for solid organ transplant recipients without impacting the negative test rate, a retrospective study found.
Compared with a pre-intervention period, C. diff toxin test orders dropped 47% after a diagnostic stewardship program was enacted (median 18 vs 8.5 processed orders per quarter, respectively, P=0.038), reported Michael Kueht, MD, of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and colleagues, writing in Transplantation Proceedings.
Read the full story here.
As the world continues to battle with a staggering pandemic that understandably has captured nearly every aspect of medical news, millions of people fight battles as before with major illnesses like cancer and heart disease. Among the many Americans currently suffering from potentially fatal medical conditions are those waiting for kidney, liver, or other organ transplants.
My dad Dick and aunt (and godmother) Deb are two of them. My family suffers from Polycystic Kidney Disease or PKD, a genetic disorder that reduces kidney function. Nearly half of those with PKD have kidney failure by age 60, and my father and aunt are in end-stage renal failure now. They are on the transplant list awaiting new kidneys. Read more.
Having an organ transplant can be lifesaving, and quality of life building. For most individuals in need of transplant, their journey begins with getting on the waitlist. It’s a process that may seem daunting, but knowing what to expect may alleviate some of the anxiety associated with this step. Read more.
A 57-year-old Maryland man has now survived just over three weeks with the transplanted heart of a genetically engineered pig. His doctor has hailed the operation as a “breakthrough surgery” that could help solve the organ shortage crisis. But from a scientific standpoint, it’s too early in the game to know how much it moves the ball.
The use of animal organs for humans is an idea with a long, dramatic and often disappointing history (SN: 11/4/95). There’s an old saying about xenotransplantation, as the field is known, says Joe Leventhal, a surgeon who heads the kidney transplant program at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “It’s just around the corner. The problem is, it’s a very, very, very long corner.” Read full article here.