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September 1, 2011
Dallas hospital seeking candidates for hand transplants
The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas announced this week that it expects to perform the first hand transplant in North Texas within a year, becoming the sixth U.S. hospital capable of doing the delicate operation.
Transplant specialists are now screening potential patients, and anyone in the Austin area who is interested in being considered is encouraged to contact the hospital.
“Patients who have lost their hands years, even decades ago, are candidates,” said Dr. Tae Chong, below, an assistant professor at Southwestern and director of reconstructive transplantation in its plastic surgery department.
However, the person’s amputation must have occurred at least six or nine months before they can be considered for the operation, Chong wrote in an email. “I would want the patient to have tried a prosthetic,” he wrote. “This gives them the opportunity to adjust to the loss and try the alternative which is the use of a prosthetic.”
Patients who need a hand transplant typically have had a traumatic accident, severe burns or were injured in the military.
More than 40 hand transplants have been done since the first one was performed in 1998 in France, according to the school. The first U.S. hand transplant was in 1999 in Louisville.
For information on the hand transplant program, call 214-645-1919.
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April 22, 2011
Girls far less likely than boys to be listed for kidney transplant
Girls are much less likely than boys to be put on the waiting list for a kidney transplant, a new, large study says.
Researchers this week from the University of California Davis School of Medicine announced the finding, published online in the journal Pediatric Transplantation, after reviewing data from 4,473 patients. They examined a database involving 150 kidney treatment centers in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Costa Rica. They found that of children and young adults under 21 who had started dialysis, girls were 22 percent less likely than boys to be placed on the wait list for a transplant.
People with end-stage renal disease receive dialysis to clean their kidneys because the organs can no longer do the job.
“If the goal is to get them transplanted as soon as possible, then they need to be wait-listed as soon as possible,” said the study’s lead author, Stephanie Nguyen, an assistant professor of pediatric nephrology at the UC Davis School of Medicine. “The longer they’re waiting for a transplant, the worse their outcomes will be.”
Interestingly, the study found black children were more likely to be listed.
Infants also had trouble being listed, but girls especially stood, the study says. When they asked why, the most common reason given to researchers was that a medical evaluation for a transplant was pending.
The researchers said transplant centers need to get a better grip on the problem.
In the Austin area, St. David’s North Austin Medical Center performs kidney transplants.
“Future studies to further clarify the potential barriers to both living and deceased donor kidney transplantation are required,” the paper concludes. “Specifically, future studies should address center practice variations for wait-listing pediatric patients and how medical complications may delay transplantation.”
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April 8, 2010
Scott & White plans to start transplanting hearts
Scott & White Memorial Hospital in Temple is in the final steps of winning approval to do heart transplants, a spokesman said.
Right now Seton Medical Center is the only hospital in Central Texas that performs heart transplants. But Scott & White probably had to demonstrate that it could perform a heart transplant by doing at least one to start its transplant program. It expects to get final approval in June at a meeting of the United Network of Organ Sharing (UNOS), which has granted the program interim approval, said Scott Clark, a spokesman for Scott & White Healthcare.
“I don’t have information about if we’ve done a heart transplant yet or when we think we will,” Clark said.
The Temple hospital already is listed on the UNOS Web site as one of 12 Texas hospitals that perform heart transplants. The other hospitals closest to Seton that performs them are in San Antonio: Methodist Specialty and Transplant Hospital and Christus Santa Rosa Medical Center.
Scott & White Memorial already has approval from UNOS — which coordinates organ transplants in the U.S. — to transplant two other organs, the kidneys and pancreas, Clark said.
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March 9, 2009
Doctors advise against banking babies' cord blood, with exceptions
New parents are generally asked whether they want to save their baby’s cord blood just in case their child or another family member might need a stem cell transplant later to treat a disease or disorder.
There are storage costs to consider, plus the notion that the field is new and the blood might never be used. But many parents feel stuck: Would they be tossing out something priceless?
A study led by researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute found broad concensus among 93 cell transplant doctors in the United States and Canada that parents should not bank their newborns’ umbilical cord blood unless another member of the family is at risk for a blood disease, according to the study abstract. The doctors said that of the thousands of transplants they had performed, they could identify just four or five cases in which cord blood that had been banked “just in case” was actually used. They identified just nine cases in which children had used their own banked blood, according to a news release about the study.
The findings are published in the March issue of the journal “Pediatrics” and generally are in line with recommendations of various medical organizations.
Private cord blood banks typically charge $1,500 to $2,000 to collect the blood and charge $100 to $200 a year to store it, the release says.
The researchers concluded that none of the physicians “would recommend private cord blood banking for a newborn with one healthy sibling when both parents were of northern European descent; 11% would recommend banking when parents were of different minority ethnicities,” according to the abstract.
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