Transplantation News

A small study conducted by researchers in Ireland shows use of Vitamin D supplementation among patients with a kidney transplant does not worsen cases of hypercalcemia.

At the University of Illinois Hospital at Chicago, we have been using robotic surgery to transplant high-risk kidney patients since 2010, when we did the first successful robotic kidney transplant in a morbidly obese patient.1 Since then with more than 18 years of experience using the surgical robot technology, we have successfully performed more than 250 kidney transplant surgeries with obese patients.

The special use of robotic surgery by Enrico Benedetti, MD, for performing kidney transplants is one example of how these instruments are used in health care. Many specialties, including orthopedics, obstetrics/gynecology and oncology are using the devices to perform minimally invasive surgical procedures. According to the website Analytics Insight, the following are the seven largest manufacturers of robotics for medical applications:

Patients who received one of the 21,167 kidney transplants performed in the United States last year no doubt want to ensure their new organ stays healthy, ie, rejection free. Even when patients stick to their prescribed immunosuppressive drug regimen, however, data show 10% to 20% of patients will experience at least one episode of rejection. In most cases, it occurs in the first 6 months of the transplant.

WASHINGTON — A speaker at the KidneyX Summit addressed three goals of the HHS that could aid in the efforts to transform the kidney care community to better prevent, diagnose and treat kidney disease.

Constructing a national registry to improve long-term monitoring of living kidney donors — in a way that is similar to the continued care provided to recipients — could be valuable in preventing the likelihood of donors experiencing an adverse event, according to a recently published study.

While hypertension diagnoses differed for prospective kidney donors based on modality and which guidelines were used, lower blood pressure cutoffs reduced the overall prevalence of missing the condition, according to a recently published study.

Despite implementation of the kidney allocation system, racial disparities continue in access to transplant, with white patients being more likely than black or Hispanic patients to resolve issues of inactivity on the waitlist, according to a recently published study.

For the first time, a team from Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore transplanted a kidney from a person living with HIV to a transplant recipient also living with HIV. The doctors in the case say both the donor and the recipient are doing well, according to a Johns Hopkins press release.

Due to the implementation of the new kidney allocation system, highly sensitized kidney transplant recipients received more kidneys with lower kidney donor profile indexes. Higher index scores were associated with improved patient survival and graft loss more than calculated panel-reactive antibody level, according to a study.