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Meeting the demand for kidney transplants is a big problem worldwide. In the UK, for example, only 18% of patients waiting on the kidney transplant list and 28% on kidney/pancreas transplant list received a transplant during 2008-09. Donations from living people only made up 37% of the total UK kidney transplant programme in the same [...]
Last week my colleague Sally Carter and I had a go at doing the news roundup for the BMJ podcast. First, Sally spoke about the passing of the health reform bill in the US and all the BMJ‘s coverage of the legislation itself and the bill’s rocky passage. Then I covered a remarkable news story [...]
The BMJ has just published an interesting paper on the factors that determine whether family agree to donate the organs of a brain dead relative. According to the meta-analysis by researchers at the University of Oxford, careful timing and having a transplant coordinator make the request are key factors in whether relatives consent to organ [...]
A new study of more than a million transplant recipients has found that rejection rates are lower in patients who receive two organs at once than in those who receive a single organ. The study, published in Annals of Surgery, found that the rejection rates for organs cotransplanted with a donor-specific liver, heart or kidney [...]
When searching eTOCs or browsing the web, I can’t help but be drawn to slightly strange or bizarre medical cases. Not the ‘Pregnant man gives birth to a baby girl‘ genre of stories, although I will confess to a morbid fascination, but also disgust, at ‘Urgh look at this freak’ tales. Given that I’m generally [...]