Copyright 2008 Medical News Today Latest Transplants / Organ Donations News From Medical News Today. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/sections/transplants/ admin@medicalnewstoday.com (MNT Admin) editors@medicalnewstoday.com (MNT Editors) en-us Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/114058.php People in Wales will now be able to join the Organ Donor Register when they visit their local pharmacy as part of the Donate Wales - Tell a Loved One campaign. Registration leaflets and dispensers have been delivered to all 719 pharmacies in Wales including high street retailers and independent stores. Sat, 05 Jul 2008 00:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/113875.php New research published in The Lancet suggests that sex-matching kidney donors and recipients may result in better outcomes. The report finds that when females receive a male donor kidney, they have higher rates of graft failure compared to the other three combinations of donor and recipient. These findings imply that future studies and decisions about organ donations should take sex into consideration. Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/113704.php The Australian Medical Association congratulated the Rudd Government on its multi-million dollar proposal to assist in the organ transplant rate in Australia. AMA President, Dr Rosanna Capolingua, said the answer to the organ transplant problem was not just about increasing the number of donations. "The Government's new funding of $136.4 million goes a long way towards ensuring that more organ transplants actually can take place," she said. Wed, 02 Jul 2008 06:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/113667.php Doctors expressed their disappointment today (Wednesday 2 July) that the UK lags far behind other European countries in the level of organ donation, and called on UK governments to do more to increase awareness about the importance of this issue. Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/113534.php The House of Lords European Union Committee has welcomed EU proposals for a European directive on the quality and safety of organ donation and transplantation but has stressed that, in establishing minimum standards across Europe, the EU must not impose requirements beyond those which are clinically justifiable. The Committee stress that any directive should include significant flexibility to allow scope for clinical judgement and patient choice. Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/113424.php Can split liver transplantation reliably yield grafts for two adults? Experts consider this question alongside new findings about the procedure in the July issue of Liver Transplantation, a journal by John Wiley & Sons. The articles are also available online at Wiley Interscience (http://www.interscience.wiley.com/). Thu, 26 Jun 2008 02:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/112772.php University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine physicians and bioethicists are calling for a new, more standardized way for patients in need of organ transplants to be informed of the risks they face. If adopted, their policy recommendations could promote greater equity in how organs are allocated while restricting patients' abilities to "cherry-pick" the best organs. Thu, 26 Jun 2008 02:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/112766.php Terumo Heart, Inc. announced approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at the University of Michigan to move forward with the DuraHeart(TM) Left Ventricular Assist System (LVAS) U.S. Pivotal Trial for a Bridge to Transplant (BTT) indication. Francis Pagani, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the Adult Heart Transplantation and Artificial Devices Program at the University of Michigan, will serve as the National Co-Principal Investigator of the U.S. Pivotal Trial. Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/112763.php The House of Lords EU Committee will next week publish a report on EU proposals to increase the supply of donor organs within the European Union. The report, Increasing the supply of donor organs within the European Union, will look in detail at the European Commission's Communication of May 2007, which set out a number of proposals for action at Community and Member State levels to increase the supply of donor organs in the EU. Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/112761.php Eliminating racial and ethnic health disparities is one of the goals of Healthy People 2010, the nation's roadmap to improving the health of all Americans. To address this challenge, the Center for Minority Health (CMH) at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health has joined forces with researchers, community organizers, philanthropists and federal and state agencies to launch the Academy for Health Equity. Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/112760.php Higher levels of the immune protein interleukin-6 (IL-6), a biomarker for inflammation, are associated with decreased survival in patients receiving organs for transplant from brain-dead donors, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers report in the June issue of Critical Care Medicine, the official journal of the Society of Critical Care Medicine. Thu, 26 Jun 2008 01:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/112748.php Silence Therapeutics plc (London AIM: SLN) announces that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a Quark Pharmaceuticals Inc ("Quark") Investigational New Drug application (IND) for an siRNA therapeutic product based on Silence's unique proprietary chemistry. The product, DGFi, was discovered and is being developed by Quark for use in kidney transplantation. Rights to the AtuRNAi structure of DGFi were licensed to Quark by Silence Therapeutics. Wed, 25 Jun 2008 05:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/112708.php With major surgery now occurring at a rate of 234 million procedures per year - one for every 25 people - and studies indicating that a significant percentage result in preventable complications and deaths, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched a new safety checklist for surgical teams to Thu, 19 Jun 2008 04:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/111910.php Withdrawing certain immunosuppressive drugs following kidney transplantation prolongs survival and saves money compared with keeping patients on these medications for life, according to a study appearing in the September 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Society Nephrology (JASN). Tue, 17 Jun 2008 04:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/111579.php The AMA adopted policy calling for the modification of current law to allow pilot studies on financial incentives for cadaveric organ donation. The current law, the National Organ Transplantation Act, prohibits financial incentives for organ donation, stating that any motivation for donation other than altruism is unethical. The AMA already supports study into financial incentives for cadaveric organ donation. Tue, 17 Jun 2008 03:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/111561.php When a mouse's immune system is deciding whether to reject a skin graft, one powerful member of a molecular family designed to provoke such a response can effectively reduce the visibility of the mouse's own cells and help the graft survive, researchers say. "This is a molecule with huge potential to regulate immune response," Dr. Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/111448.php The growing shortage of kidneys to be used for transplantation has spurred a debate between two specialists that is published in two opinion articles in BMJ. Arthur Matas (Professor of Surgery at the University of Minnesota) argues that a solution to the supply problem lies in a regulated compensation system for living donors. Mon, 16 Jun 2008 01:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/111395.php Should potential organ donors be permitted to limit the use of their organs to specific groups or individual patients? A special forum in the June 15 issue of Transplantation, presents expert views on the controversial issue of conditional organ donation. Sat, 14 Jun 2008 02:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/111225.php England cricketer Andy Caddick joins Sam & Sean O'Brien's campaign to add one million people to the organ donor register in 2008 Sean O'Brien has cancer and urgently needs a liver transplant. Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/111056.php UroToday.com - Tangeraas, et al. retrospectively reviewed their experience with pediatric renal transplantation between the years of 1970 to 2006. Overall, 251 renal transplantations were performed in 178 children in Norway. 84% of the transplantations were living donors and 52% were performed preemptively. Pre transplant dialysis was a median of three months. Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/110810.php While gardening gloves and golf balls will be typical presents in thousands of homes this Father's Day, one special group of dads can thank their children for something far more valuable - the gift of life. Figures from NHS UK Transplant show that at least 125 children - 74 sons and 51 daughters - have donated a kidney to save their dad since the first recorded child-to-father transplant in 1982. All the transplants took place with the children as adults. Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/110660.php ParkwayHealth, Asia's leading healthcare provider with the largest network of private hospitals and healthcare services headquartered in Singapore and the first in Asia to perform a living donor liver transplant (LDLT) in 2002, reports that its Gleneagles Hospital has performed over one hundred successful LDLT procedures to date. With the full program in place, the hospital expects to perform about 50 procedures annually. Sun, 08 Jun 2008 00:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/110325.php A gap in survival rates between whites and minorities who had received a liver transplant appears to have been eliminated, possibly due to the introduction of a new medication to prevent organ rejection, new research finds, Reuters reports. Johnny Hong of the University of California-Los Angeles Sun, 08 Jun 2008 00:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/110212.php Nearly 9 percent of patients who recently underwent liver transplantation suffered a subsequent surgical site infection (SSI). Risk factors included having had biliary-enteric anastomosis (choledocho-jejunal or hepatic-jejunal reconstruction), previous liver or kidney transplant, and more than four red blood cell units transfused. These findings are published in the June issue of Liver Transplantation, a journal by John Wiley & Sons. Thu, 05 Jun 2008 02:00:00 PDT http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/109944.php Invitrogen Corporation (NASDAQ:IVGN), a provider of essential life science technologies for research, production and diagnostics, announced it received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance for its DynaChip™ Antibody Analysis System. The DynaChip™ system is the only automated chip-based system for human leukocyte antigen (HLA) antibody detection and identification.