ReportWire

Tag: kidneys

  • A Temple Hospital worker needed a kidney transplant. When the call finally came, his colleague performed it

    A Temple Hospital worker needed a kidney transplant. When the call finally came, his colleague performed it

    [ad_1]

    Julian Harmon assists doctors, nurses and patients in the operating rooms where organ transplants are performed at Temple University Hospital.

    Harmon also has lived with kidney disease for nearly a decade and was put on the kidney transplant waiting list in 2019. Of the more than 90,000 Americans waiting for a kidney, only 28,144 received one in 2023.

    But every day at work, Harmon remained hopeful as he cleaned operating rooms, took specimens to labs and transported patients in and out of surgeries. 

    “I would even meet people who were going to get a kidney transplant,” said Harmon, who works as a perioperative services assistant.

    Instead of making him feel jealous or resentful, Harmon said talking to others as he wheeled them into operating rooms for transplant surgery helped him maintain hope. “I knew I wasn’t alone,” he said. “I always knew I would get the surgery done.”

    On Jan. 6, 2023, Harmon received a call at work that a kidney was available for him. Within hours, Harmon was in one of the operating rooms where he spends his days, receiving a life-saving transplant performed by Dr. Kenneth Chavin, director of Temple Health’s Abdominal Organ Transplant Program, whose locker happens to sit right next to Harmon’s.

    “Now we’ve become friends,” Chavin said. “He’s maintaining his kidney beautifully.”

    Earlier in April, Harmon and Chavin threw out the first pitch at a Phillies game. Their appearance was a way to celebrate and raise awareness about kidney donation during National Donate Life Month.

    Kidney disease is the fastest-growing noncommunicable disease in the United States and kills more people each year than breast or prostate cancer. About 37 million Americans are living with kidney disease, including 808,000 with kidney failure. 

    Black Americans are more than four times as likely to develop kidney failure than white Americans. Hispanic and Native Americans are more than twice as likely. 

    The shortage of available kidneys means that the majority of people living with kidney failure – which has no cure – are on dialysis while they hope for a kidney transplant. More than 556,000 people are on kidney dialysis, according to the American Kidney Fund.

    Harmon eventually ended up on dialysis after being diagnosed in 2015 with IgA nephropathy, a disease in which IgA protein builds up in and damages the filtering part of the kidney. For about four years, Harmon had to do peritoneal dialysis at home for 12 hours each night. The process which required him to attach a catheter surgically placed in his abdomen to a machine that pumped cleansing fluid into his stomach and waste products from his blood.

    “I would come home, make myself dinner, wash up and hook myself onto the machine,” Harmon said. “Some nights would be good, and some nights I would end up lying the wrong way and all sorts of alarms would go off.”

    His mother and his tight group of friends kept his spirits up. “I knew I had people in my corner,” Harmon said.

    “I used to work through the week and by the weekend I would be exhausted,” Harmon said. Often he had to rest in bed most of the weekend to regain the strength to return to work the following week.

    His mother worried about him, Harmon said. “To see me from there to now – she’s just ecstatic.

    “When you’re doing dialysis, there are a lot of things you have to sacrifice,” such as a social life, said Harmon, who now has a girlfriend.

    Receiving a kidney transplant is “transformational,” Chavin said, noting that it allows people to “go back to normal activity.”

    With more research and knowledge about the immune system and medication, one-year survival rates after a kidney transplant are now about 90%, Chavin said. In the early days of transplant surgery, they were closer to 50%.

    Someone who donates a kidney and then needs a transplant for whatever reason goes to the “top of the list,” Chavin said, “so the system has this safety net.”

    Donating organs not only impacts the people who receive them, but also “their legacy, what they do in life,” Chavin said.

    By sharing his story, Harmon said he hopes more people will consider organ donation. 

    “There are a lot of people in my situation,” Harmon said, “A lot of people who deserve that second chance at life.”


    People can register to be an organ donor when renewing their driver’s licenses or state IDs. They also can register online.

    [ad_2]

    Courtenay Harris Bond

    Source link

  • How ADPKD Affects Children

    How ADPKD Affects Children

    [ad_1]

    Doctors used to call autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) adult polycystic kidney disease. That’s because kids who carry one of two genes that cause it usually don’t feel sick. But ADPKD is a dominant genetic disease. Unlike many other conditions, it takes just one faulty copy of a gene to have ADPKD.

    What that means is, for every child of a parent with the condition, the odds of APDKD are the same as the flip of a coin. A genetic test could give you the answer from birth or even before. But there’s a lot that an early gene test can’t tell you. That’s because ADPKD symptoms can vary a lot, even within the same family. Either way, the worst symptoms don’t show up until much later in life.

    “To the children, it often feels a lot less severe,” says Charlotte Gimpel, MD, a pediatric nephrologist at Medical Center — University of Freiburg in Germany. “Adults get huge kidneys and can have a lot of pain until finally their kidneys fail and they need dialysis. It’s a severe disease for adults. For children, it used to be said that it’s asymptomatic.”

    What Are Early ADPKD Signs?

    Gimpel says the idea that kids with ADPKD don’t have any symptoms isn’t “really true,” though. Some kids already will have pain in their sides or back. They may have urinary tract infections (UTIs), kidney stones, or blood in the urine from cysts that already have started forming in the kidneys. Gimpel says kids may have trouble staying dry through the night if their kidneys aren’t working as well as they should.

    “More children than we used to think get hypertension or proteinuria” (extra protein in their urine that’s an early sign of kidney damage), she says, “It doesn’t feel like you’re ill, but you can treat it.”

    As doctors have begun to catch these early signs of ADPKD, they’ve started to change how they treat kids who may have the condition. “It used to be ‘keep your fingers off’ and don’t bother them with thinking about what you might have until they’re adults and can decide for themselves,” Gimpel says.

    There’s no treatment to stop the cysts or future kidney problems. A drug to treat ADPKD is now approved for adults, but there’s still no way to treat ADPKD in kids. But doctors can help in other ways.

    “If you leave them alone altogether, you miss the 20% who have a treatable condition,” Gimpel says. “You can’t really cure cystic disease, but treating hypertension is important for slowing progression [of kidney problems].”

    ADPKD affects other parts of the body, too. Adults with it can have problems in the liver, pancreas, intestines, and heart. But, Gimpel says, there’s no sign these issues happen early in life, and kids don’t need extra screening.

    Should You Test Your Kids?

    You don’t need to be sure of ADPKD in a child to tackle early signs as they arise, Gimpel says.

    Making sure not to miss those who could use early treatment is as simple as keeping tabs on blood pressure. That’s key, Gimpel says, given that feelings about testing kids vary widely in families affected over generations by ADPKD.

    “Parents feel different,” Gimpel says. “Some prefer not to know and want to put it in the back of their minds. Others really want to know. If parents and child really want to know before a child is 18, it can be OK to do genetic testing.”

    But, there’s no cure for ADPKD and no way to treat it in kids. Experts think early intervention may help, but data on that is lacking.

    “The consensus is: We don’t recommend screening [kids for ADPKD] because there’s no treatment available to stall progression,” says Christian Hanna, MD, a pediatric nephrologist at the Mayo Clinic. “There’s no FDA-approved treatment. There’s no clear evidence that detection [of ADPKD] in children with no symptoms will improve outcomes.”

    Healthy Living and Mental Health

    This isn’t to say that nothing can be done, Hanna says. Kids with ADPKD or at high risk may benefit from early education on healthy living. It’s a good idea for them to avoid salty foods and drink plenty of water. Exercise helps, but if a child already has kidney pain or cysts, it’s best to avoid contact sports like football or lacrosse.

    Don’t overlook the challenges for kids’ mental health. Kids may have seen their grandparents die from kidney problems, Gimpel says. They may see a parent with ADPKD living in pain. Whether or not a child has early signs, families need to think about how to talk about ADPKD with their kids. Parents should tell kids about their risks for ADPKD by the time they turn 18, if not before.

    “When a child reaches adulthood without understanding their own health risks, she says, it’s often hard for them to change their mindset about the future.

    “Talk to children in an age-appropriate way,” Gimpel says. “Don’t burden them with too many facts. It’s good to start talking [early] about the uncertainty of not knowing if they have it and how it will progress.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link