Category: Transplantation
Can an equation be racist?
Medical algorithms that correct for gender, age, comorbidities, and race span specialties from nephrology to cardiology to pediatrics to obstetrics. Such calculators help guide practitioners in daily decisions about everything from drug dosages to surgery to organ transplants. But race modifiers especially raise problems, since race is often an imprecise proxy for actual ancestry.
The journey to a pig-heart transplant began 60 years ago
On Friday, January 7 2022, David Bennett became the world’s first person to successfully receive a transplant of a pig’s heart. The eight-hour-long operation by surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, USA, was no doubt arduous. But it was a short final step in a 60-year-long journey to genetically alter the pig’s heart so that it would not be immediately rejected – a journey that began with a plane crash in Oxford in the summer of 1940.
Organ Centers to Transplant Patients: Get a Covid Shot or Move Down on Waitlist
A growing numbers of transplant programs have chosen to either bar patients who refuse to take the widely available covid vaccines from receiving transplants, or give them lower priority on crowded organ waitlists.
How lifesaving organs for transplant go missing
In a nation where nearly 113,000 people are waiting for transplants, scores of organs — mostly kidneys — are discarded after they don’t reach their destination in time.
Human-animal hybrids are coming
Human-animal hybrids are coming and could be used to grow organs for transplant. What does it mean? A philosopher weighs in
Calls Grow For Medicare To Cover Anti-Rejection Drugs After Kidney Transplant
Medicare has covered transplant patients who had end-stage renal disease. But coverage ends after 36 months for those younger than 65.
Minorities face obstacles to transplants
African American, Latinx and Native American patients often wait longer for life-saving transplants – or never receive one at all because of barriers to care.
Alcohol-Linked Disease Overtakes Hep C As Top Reason For Liver Transplant
One reason for the shift, researchers said, is that hepatitis C, which used to be the leading cause of liver transplants, has become easier to treat with drugs.
No Cash, No Heart. Transplant Centers Require Proof Of Payment.
Virtually all transplant centers require patients to verify how they will pay bills that can total $400,000 for a kidney transplant or $1.3 million for a heart.
Hospital ads play on fear and fun
Hospitals are using dramatic TV spots to attract lucrative patients into their hospitals as health care costs and industry competition escalate.
Trump Administration Proposes Weakening Rules Governing Organ Transplant Centers
The rules, said to be proposed to reduce “burdensome” regulations, would no longer penalize hospitals if too many of their patients die following transplants.
New Hepatitis C Drugs Mean More Organs for More Transplants
New drugs that promise a cure for the 3.5 million Americans with chronic hepatitis also are benefiting another category of patients: those awaiting life-saving organ transplants.