| News From Transplant Week of May 5, 2002 / Vol. 3 No. 18 |
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Study: Blood Filtering Could Make More Eligible to Be Kidney Donors |
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Surgeons at Johns Hopkins report that by using a blood filtering technique called plasmapheresis, they have been 93 percent successful in transplanting kidneys from donors to recipients with incompatible blood types or tissue proteins. This would appear to have the potential of significantly expanding the pool of living donors for kidney patients awaiting transplants, who until now have needed to find a donor from a compatible blood group and with a so-called "negative crossmatch." "With this innovation, I can tell any patient who has a live donor and is medically eligible that they can be transplanted with a high likelihood of success," said Dr. Robert A. Montgomery, assistant professor of surgery. Montgomery
said the
technique involves giving patients awaiting a kidney transplant
plasmapheresis treatments every other day During plasmapheresis, blood is removed from the patient and a cell separator spins it at high speed, separating the blood cells from the fluid, or plasma. The blood cells are then returned to the person undergoing treatment with other fluids, while the plasma, which contains the antibodies, is discarded. Doctors also give patients intravenously a medication designed to prevent the antibodies from returning and to make patients less likely to get an infection. Montgomery said that since 1998, they have used this technique on 29 patients -- five with incompatible blood types with their donors, and 24 with incompatible tissue proteins. Today, an
average of 17 months after surgery, 27 of the transplanted kidneys
are functioning well, with normal levels of creatinine, a simple
measure of kidney function, he reported. Other sources: Johns Hopkins |
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