Medical School

Toddler received world’s smallest artificial heart as he waited for a transplant
Italian doctors have saved the life of a 16-month-old boy by implanting the world’s smallest artificial heart to keep the infant alive until a donor was found for a transplant.

The tiny titanium pump weighs only 11 grams and can handle a blood flow of 1.5 liters a minute. An artificial heart for adults weighs 900 grams.

Surgeon Antonio Amodeo said the baby had become family and his team wanted to do everything to help him.

“Every day, every hour, for more than one year he was with us. So when we had a problem we couldn’t do anything more than our best,” he said. (Photo: Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters)

(Source: nationalpost)

jayparkinsonmd:

Nearly 7,000 people in the United States die each year while waiting for an organ transplant. It is a number that Facebook hopes to lower with its vast network of 161 million members in this country.

The company announced a plan on Tuesday morning to encourage everyone on Facebook to start advertising their donor status on their pages, along with their birth dates and schools — a move that it hopes will create peer pressure to nudge more people to add their names to the rolls of registered organ donors.

thenextweb:

To add that you’re an organ donor to your Timeline, you have to follow the following instructions: Click Life Event at the top of your timeline Select Health & Wellness Select Organ Donor Select your audience and click Save (via Facebook’s ‘Life-Saving’ Feature: Organ Donation Status on Timeline)

A Swedish hospital reports its doctors implanted a synthetic windpipe into a 36-year-old man who had tracheal cancer, in what its officials call the first successful procedure of its kind.

Micronodular cirrhosis developing in a transplanted liver with chronic rejection

From a 5-year-old girl who received this liver about a year ago after fulminant hepatic failure. She developed acute rejection within month of transplantation and attempts at preventing rejection were unsuccessful. Histologically, a typical cirrhosis was not present since regenerative nodules were lacking.

(A) Image of the damaged lung; (B) Image of the donor lung 23 months after transplantation

Surgeons performing a kidney transplant

View of the operating room during a lung transplant procedure

Human donor lung ready for transplant

Patient’s lifesaving donor heart arrives ‘warm and beating’ inside experimental device

When Rob Evans’ new donor heart arrived at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, the organ wasn’t frozen on ice inside a cooler, as is typical. Instead, it was delivered in an experimental device that kept it warm and beating with oxygen and nutrient-rich blood during its journey from Northern California.

(Source: medicalxpress.com)

Kidney Transplant

The first cadaveric kidney transplantation in the United States was performed June 17, 1950, on Ruth Tucker, a 44-year-old woman with polycystic kidney disease, at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park, Illinois. Although the donated kidney was rejected ten months later because no immunosuppressive therapy was available at the time—the development of effective antirejection drugs was years away—the intervening time gave Tucker’s remaining kidney time to recover and she lived another five years.

Kidney Transplant is the most common of the transplant surgeries, and can be done with both living donors, or deceased donors.

The key thing in the surgical procedure is that in most cases the barely functioning existing kidneys are not removed, as this has been shown to increase the rates of surgical morbidities. Therefore, the kidney is usually placed in a location different from the original kidney, often in the iliac fossa, so it is often necessary to use a different blood supply.

(Source: mediclopedia)