Latest Organ donation Stories
PITTSBURGH, May 5 /PRNewswire/ -- A special event featuring a life-size version of a favorite surgical board game and social media are credited with motivating over 130 students at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh to sign up for the It's On! Campus Challenge, a campaign for organ and tissue donation awareness held during April, National Donate Life Month. The friendly competition to see which Pennsylvania colleges and universities could register the most new organ donors highlighted an...
Analysis: Time to move to presumed consent for organ donationThe Organ Donor Taskforce is unrealistic if it thinks that it can dramatically increase donation rates without adopting a policy of presumed consent, say experts on bmj.com today.The authors, Sheila Bird from the MRC Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge and John Harris from the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation in Manchester, argue that "the taskforce did not consider all the relevant evidence, particularly on relatives'...
Patients should do research before deciding where they will get their transplant, study suggestsFor patients in need of a liver transplant, their choice of a transplant center can make a noteworthy difference in their outcomes, according to a Mayo Clinic study presented at the American Transplant Congress under way May 1-5 in San Diego."We did find significant variation between centers in patient outcomes in the first year after transplant," says Ray Kim, M.D., one of the lead...
Northwestern Memorial Performs Eight-Way Paired Kidney Exchange Transplant; Among Largest Single-Center Paired Exchanges in the United States CHICAGO, April 28 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Chicago resident Maria Isho had been waiting for over nine years for a kidney transplant. Her body was highly sensitized, meaning that her body had built up antibodies in the blood, which made it difficult for her to find a match. To stay healthy, she endured a grueling dialysis regimen which diminished her...
A new tool may help neurologists predict which coma patients may be candidates for organ donation, according to a study published in the April 27, 2010, print issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.Organ donations must take place within 60 minutes of when the heart stops beating. Coma patients and other people with irreversible brain injuries are often potential organ donors because their other organs are usually healthy."Neurologists must often...
A Spanish hospital announced recently that it had successfully performed the world's first complete face transplant in March after an accident five years ago left a man unable to swallow, breath or talk normally. Barcelona's Vall d'Hebron hospital said that the other 11 face transplants carried out around the world only involved part of the patient's face. Joan Pere Barret, the leader of the medical team that carried out the procedure, told a news conference that the unidentified man received...
ADDISON, Texas, April 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Promising research brings hope for the almost two thousand lung transplant candidates who currently make up The United Network for Organ Sharing's (UNOS) wait list. A new technique that uses gene therapy to help repair damaged lungs previously found unfit for transplant shows promise for addressing the critical shortage of healthy donor organs. Recent research on IL-10 Gene Therapy will be presented in today's symposium Getting to Yes - Increasing...
NEW ORLEANS, April 15 /PRNewswire/ -- National Donate Life Month (April) is a 30-day initiative to celebrate the heroes who've saved and enhanced lives through organ, eye and tissue donation and to educate the public on their options and wishes. To raise awareness, Ochsner Health System is launching the "Save Nine" campaign, a YouTube video initiative to encourage more informed decisions. With a goal of adding 6,000 more residents to the organ donor registry, Ochsner asks the public to join...
AURORA, Colo., April 8 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Wyoming led the nation in 2009 as the state with the highest eye, organ and tissue donor designation rate among residents age 18 and over. This rate, called the "Actionable Donor Designation (ADD) Population 18+ Share," is the total number of designated donors as a percentage of all state residents age 18 and over. (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20100408/DC83095LOGO) Today, the Rocky Mountain Lions Eye Bank (RMLEB) released...
AURORA, Colo., April 8 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Colorado led the nation in 2009 as the state with the highest eye, organ and tissue donor designation rate with 64.4 percent. The designation rate is the number of individuals who joined the state donor registry expressed as a percentage of all driver's licenses and ID cards issued. (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20100408/DC83095LOGO) Today, the Rocky Mountain Lions Eye Bank (RMLEB) released statistics in conjunction with the...
