Media Contact:
Kirk Monroe
202-789-8101
[email protected]
May 16 -- May 19: Press Room, 312-329-7189
EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE: Tuesday, May 18, 12:30 p.m. CST
FOR YOUNGEST TRANSPLANT RECIPIENTS: NEW TREATMENTS IMPROVING THE ODDS
Splitting Livers Could Slash the Waiting Lists; Steroid-free Heart Transplants Show Promise; Children Do Better with Livers from Child Donors; Help in the Fight Against a Lymphoma
CHICAGO -- At The American Society of Transplantation Annual Scientific Meeting in Chicago, May 15-19, the parents of children facing organ transplants received good news about new treatments that could increase the supply of organs and improve chances that children will survive and lead a normal life.
Splitting donor livers could meet the needs of most children waiting for a liver transplant.
At the AST Annual Scientific Meeting, Jorge Reyes, MD, Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, and Stephen Dunn ,M.D., St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, will discuss studies which that show that splitting livers from donors--making it possible for one liver to be transplanted into two recipients--can be an effective way to meet the need for donated organs. The studies, from Europe and the United Network for Network Sharing, show that split liver transplants have results equivalent to transplants of whole livers. While a split liver transplant is somewhat more complicated than a whole liver transplant, Reyes and Dunn argue that learning the procedure is very manageable and the results make it worthwhile. "About half of pediatric transplant patients are age 5 or less," says Dunn. "Almost every single one of them would be a candidate for a split liver transplant. We could shrink, if not eliminate, the waiting list for pediatric liver transplants every year."
Young liver transplant recipients do much better if they receive livers from child donors
Sue V. McDiarmid, MDCC, of the UCLA Medical Center, reported on a study which shows that children who receive liver transplants from donors who are children have a better graft survival rate than children who receive transplants from adult donors. The study, by McDiarmid and her colleagues, found that the probability of graft failure for children who get transplants from pediatric donors is 8.8% at one year. If children get livers from adult donors, however, the probability of graft failure almost doubles, to 16.3%. "This is important because about 2/3 of pediatric donors are now transplanted into adult patients," McDiarmid says. "Children could benefit from having access to these organs."
Children who receive heart transplants may not need steroids to fight off rejection.
Since transplantation began, most children who receive donated hearts have been treated with steroids to help them prevent their bodies from rejecting the new organ. But steroids have particularly dangerous side effects for children, including reduced growth, loss of calcium, cataracts, etc. Mark Boucek, MD, Children's Hospital Denver, will report that he and his colleagues have had excellent results treating pediatric heart recipients using only standard medications and no steroids. Children's Hospital's survival curves are as good as or better than the national average, and the Children's patients live a more normal life. The results indicate that it is safer to do transplants without ever using steroids than it is to start patients with steroids and then try to wean them off. "It appears steroids are being so widely used for historical reasons--we use them because we've always used them--than for strong medical reasons," says Boucek.
Virus-specific "killer" T-cells may help young transplant patients fight a common form of lymphoma.
Cliona Rooney, Ph.D, of the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy at Baylor College of Medicine will describe a new study that will test whether "killer" T cells designed to eliminate Epstein-Barr virus-transformed cells can help fight a form of lymphoma particularly common in children who have received organ transplants. The EBV-related malignancies are fatal in about half of solid organ recipients who develop them. Killer T-cells have proven to be effective as prevention and treatment for bone marrow recipients, whose immune systems are suppressed drastically and who are also at risk for EBV-associated lymphomas. "Solid organ recipients must have their immune systems suppressed for a much longer time, so we want to test how well they respond to treatments with EBV-specific cells," says Rooney.
###
RSS