News by Subject Medicine & Health

Unauthorized immigrants who receive liver transplants in the United States have comparable three-year survival rates to US citizens, according to a study by researchers at UC San Francisco. Yet access to life-saving organs for this population varies widely by state, in part due to a medical misperception that undocumented migrants face a higher risk of transplant failure.

A woman's bone marrow may determine her ability to start and sustain a pregnancy, report Yale researchers in PLOS Biology. The study shows that when an egg is fertilized, stem cells leave the bone marrow and travel via the bloodstream to the uterus, where they help transform the uterine lining for implantation. If the lining fails to go through this essential transformation, the embryo cannot implant, and the body terminates the pregnancy.

Kidneys from donors who were infected with the Hepatitis C virus (HCV) function just as well as uninfected kidneys throughout the first year following transplantation, according to a new Penn Medicine study. The analysis of kidney transplant recipients across the United States also revealed a threefold increase in the number of transplant centers using HCV-infected kidneys and a major change in how the organs are allocated.

This observational study examined among liver transplant candidates whether the association of frailty and increased risk of death while on the waiting list for a transplant varied by body mass index.

An analysis that included data for nearly 1.5 million patients with end-stage kidney disease looked at whether ownership of dialysis facilities was associated with patients' access to kidney transplants. This observational study included patients treated at 6,511 dialysis facilities in the United States from 2000-2016.

A new method of preservation maintains human liver tissue for up to 27 hours will give doctors and patients a much longer timeframe for organ transplant.

Twenty people die waiting for an organ transplant every day in the US, but lab-grown organs so far lack the cellular density, vasculature, and functions required to make them viable replacements. The new SWIFT method from the Wyss Institute and Harvard SEAS solves those problems by 3D printing vascular channel networks directly into living organ building blocks, enabling the creation of larger tissues approximating the size and function of organs, including heart tissue that beats on its own over a seven-day period.