“Your kidneys play a vital role in balancing the amount of fluid in your body, detecting waste in your blood, and knowing when to release the vitamins, minerals, and hormones you need to stay alive. They do this by disposing of waste products and turning them into urine.”
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“The liver has many functions that are necessary for life. The liver helps process carbohydrates, fats and proteins, and stores vitamins. It processes nutrients absorbed from food in the intestines and turns them into materials that the body needs for life.
For example, the liver makes the factors that the blood needs for clotting. It also secretes bile to help digest fats, and breaks down toxic substances in the blood such as drugs and alcohol. The liver is also responsible for the metabolism of most drugs.”
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“A heart transplant may be the most dramatic surgery done in the operating room. Each step takes great precision, from the quick, careful journey to retrieve the heart to the preparation of the recipient, who may be gravely ill and bedridden. The best part is the outcome soon after the transplant, when the patient goes home and starts returning to his or her life—whether that means getting married, having babies, running in marathons, or simply breathing massive sighs of relief while strolling around the neighborhood without having to periodically stop to catch a breath.”
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It took less than 10 minutes for a drone to make an emergency 1.2 kilometer trip to deliver a set of lungs needed for a life-saving transplant.
This world-first took place at the end of September, in Toronto, Canada, AFP reported.
The drone flew over the skies of the Canadian metropolis in the middle of the night, taking off from the UHN’s Toronto Western Hospital and landing on the roof of the General Hospital.
The operation was made possible due to a refrigerated container in light carbon fibre which maintains the thermal parameters of the organ so that it is viable for transplantation.
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“The revamped U.S. kidney prioritization system appeared to better even the field in pediatric kidney transplant wait times — by making organs similarly harder to get for children across races and ethnicities, according to a study.
Measuring time from dialysis to transplantation, Black, Hispanic, or other children of color had significantly longer wait times compared to white children before the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network’s Kidney Allocation System (KAS) changes in 2014, but these differences were reduced afterward, Jill Krissberg, MD, MS, of Lurie’s Children Hospital of Chicago, and colleagues reported.”
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“Just a year or two from now, patients waiting for a human kidney may be able to participate in a trial for a pig kidney, if a short-term experiment at NYU Langone Health in New York City paves the way for trials in patients with end-stage kidney failure.
The successful result was released October 19 and this experiment is the first of its kind. “
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“A Bay Area research team is being awarded a major prize for a device they hope will someday free kidney patients from dialysis.
For thousands of kidney patients in the U.S., the only practical hope of getting off dialysis has been waiting for a transplant. But now, a new engineering breakthrough is reigniting hopes for a second option… an implantable artificial kidney.”
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“Scientists temporarily attached a pig’s kidney to a human body and watched it begin to work, a small step in the decades-long quest to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants.
Pigs have been the most recent research focus to address the organ shortage, but among the hurdles: A sugar in pig cells, foreign to the human body, causes immediate organ rejection. The kidney for this experiment came from a gene-edited animal, engineered to eliminate that sugar and avoid an immune system attack.”
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“Recent changes to U.S. donor heart allocation were followed by a narrowing of racial disparities in listing and transplant, though much more work remains to eliminate inequality, researchers warned.
Black patients listed for cardiac transplantation in 2011-2020 were less likely than white peers to die while waiting (adjusted HR 0.88, 95% CI 0.78-0.98). However, they ultimately had lower odds of undergoing transplant (adjusted HR 0.87, 95% CI 0.84-0.90) and a higher risk of post-transplant death (adjusted HR 1.14, 95% CI 1.04-1.24), reported P. Elliott Miller, MD, of Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, and colleagues.”
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“The biomarker, class I human leukocyte antigen (HLA) evolutionary divergence (HED), was tied to liver transplant rejection in adults and children, French researchers found.
In a retrospective study, adult-donor class I HED was associated with acute liver transplant rejection (HR 1.09, 95% CI 1.03-1.16) and chronic rejection (HR 1.20, 95% CI 1.10-1.31), in addition to 50% or greater ductopenia (HR 1.33, 95% CI 1.09-1.62), reported Cyrille Feray, MD, PhD, of the Hôpital Paul-Brousse in Villejuif, France, and colleagues.”
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