• How to Choose your Organ Transplant Center

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    • 4th Oct 2011

    • It may not be easy to decide where to have your organ transplant with all the options you can find out there. Every hospital promotes itself as the best in its category (you have heard that before, right?!). The patients who live in a large metropolitan area are lucky because they may have access to several hospitals close to home. Kidney transplant is the surgery that is the most performed and has the most widespread locations. Hospitals are competing for

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  • New Heart Transplant Device Use to Deliver Warm (Heart) Organ

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    • 31st Aug 2011

    • A new device being tested at UCLA Medical Center in California is use to deliver heart ready for transplant. Traditionally organs are delivered on ice from the organ donor site to the recipient hospital. As soon as the heart is removed from the body it is put on ice in a cooler and has to be used within 4 hours. The heart is then on “pause” and race against time starts so the heart spends as little time as possible

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  • What is it the age limit for organ transplant?

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    • 23rd Aug 2011

    • If I was asked that question 10-15 years ago the answer would have been different than today.   It was safe to say that most transplant center did not do any transplantation on patients older than 60 years old.  These days you have a chance to become an organ recipient as old as 70 years and even a little more depending on the hospital you choose. Usually, for younger patients, it is almost a no brainer to be accepted by a

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  • Organ Transplant and Skin Cancer

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    • 5th Jul 2011

    • Skin cancer is a major problem after organ transplant. The longer a patient lives the higher the incidence is. Since transplant patients are living longer than ever before, we are seeing more skin cancer and sometimes as early as after the first year. People, it is not a joke when your doctors or transplant coordinators warns you of using precautions under the sun.  Some studies also show heart and kidney transplant recipients being more at risk than the other organs.

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  • Top 10 Mistakes Patients Make After Organ Transplant (part 2)

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    • 5th Jun 2011

    • Yesterday, I posted the first 5 main mistakes transplant patients make. Today I will present the remaining 5 mistakes that we observe and could shorten your survival post-transplant. 6. Not exercising. Every single patients (actually this is good for everybody, including me!) should enrolled in a structured program of physical conditioning, providing that their physician has cleared them to do so. A structured environment is much better since you will have someone pushing in your back to have you take

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  • Top 10 Mistakes Patients Make After Organ Transplant (Part 1)

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    • 4th Jun 2011

    • It takes about 2-3 months for an average patient to recover from a solid organ transplantation and be able to say “I start feeling great!”. The first several weeks after surgery new patients call me, as a transplant coordinator, 2-3 times a week and most of the time it is due to anxiety. After that 3 months threshold, providing everything is good, we barely hear from some of the patients anymore. In a way, it is a good thing because

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  • Lung and Heart Transplant Surgeons Efficient Day and Night

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    • 1st Jun 2011

    • Several patients don’t want to be operated on at night for fear that more mistakes happen due to fatigue and stress.  If you are a lung or heart transplant patient you don’t have to worry anymore.  A study that came out in the Journal of the American Medical Association (AMA) is proving that there is no more risk at night than daytime for organ transplant surgery.  It suggests the reason being that the transplant team is used to it and

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