• Facebook Helping Find Organ Donors

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    • 3rd Jan 2012

    • Early on when Facebook was created it was used to find old friends and stay in contact with people we care but didn’t necessarily have time to call or meet. Nowadays it is used to save people’s lives. Social media have expanded their role and now it goes beyond imagination. Patients waiting for organ transplant now turn toward Facebook in order to increase their pool of potential organ donors. Most of the living donors are giving one of their kidneys.

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  • The Fastest Way to Get a Kidney Transplant.

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    • 28th Dec 2011

    • Have you ever heard of a paired exchange?  It may also be known as a kidney swap.  The whole process is fairly easy to understand and allows patients to receive a kidney transplant within a year instead of waiting the traditional 2 to 4 years. First of all, the patient in need of a new kidney should have a family member or somebody willing to give his organ directly to him.  It is called a living donor.  A perfect match

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  • Grandpa Could Become a Living Kidney Donor

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    • 31st Oct 2011

    • It is now proven that people over the age of 70 years old can safely become a living organ donor for kidney transplant.  A study that will come out in the Clinical Journal of the American Society Nephrology is showing there is no more risk for elderly to become organ donor than younger donors.  The investigators have studied more than 200 living kidney donor over the age of 70 and compared them with healthy people of the same age.  The

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  • Renal Transplant and Pregnancy Can go Along Successfully (Maybe)

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    • 25th Oct 2011

    • It is not recommended for a renal transplant patient to become pregnant after transplantation but it can be done successfully as long as the future mom is aware of the risks.  According to a study published in the American Journal of Transplantation, pregnancy after kidney transplant is associated to higher live birth rate, lower miscarriage but more complications than the general US population.  I would have never thought that kidney transplant patient could have babies with relatively good outcome. Dark

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  • Could Stem Cell Therapy Eliminate the Need for Immunosuppressant in Kidney Transplant?

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    • 7th Oct 2011

    •                  According to Dr Samuel Strober, an immunologist and professor of medicine at Stanford, stem cells therapy could potentially eliminate the need for long term use of immunosuppressant therapy such as prograf, prednisone, cellcept, etc.  They have enrolled 12 patients who underwent “perfect” match kidney transplant.  A perfect match would be a kidney received from a living donor which most likely is a relative.  Out of those 12 patients, 8 of them have

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  • 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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  • 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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  • Do I need to be rich to qualify for organ transplant?

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    • 22nd Aug 2011

    • A lot of people I talk to think you need to be at least in the middle class with private insurance to qualify for organ transplant. This is a myth. Over 80% of the transplant recipients have Medicare or Medicaid as a primary insurance and have no job and not much money. As a matter of fact, a transplant center that does not have a contract with Medicare for organ transplant has no chance of running a big program. Medicare

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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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  • Is it Time for Kidney Donation with Compensation?

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    • 10th Jun 2011

    • Some transplantation leaders in the US are starting to push for a compensation system to increase the number of kidney living donation.  This is a very ethical debate where both sides of the argument have good points.  With a waiting list approaching 90,000 patients hoping to receive a kidney transplant some argue that it is time to implement a compensation system to increase the number of living donation. For the past 10 years the number of persons waiting for a

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