News by Subject Medicine & Health

Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have demonstrated a new, rapid method to obtain donor stem cells for bone marrow transplants using a combination of Viagra and a second drug called Plerixafor. Bone marrow transplants, used mostly in the treatment of cancer, are life-saving procedures to restore the stem cells that generate new blood cells throughout a person's life.

Researchers compared long-term outcomes between transplant patients who received conventional donor lungs and those who received high-risk donor lungs that had been assessed and reconditioned outside the body through a technique known as ex vivo lung perfusion.

Every year in the United States, about 7,500 people die while waiting for an organ transplant, and that number is expected to increase in coming years as demographics shift.

People living with HIV who received kidney transplants from deceased donors with HIV had high rates of overall survival and kidney graft survival after five years, according to an observational study published online today. The study was a collaboration of researchers from NIH and the University of Cape Town, South Africa, with joint support from NIH and the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC). The investigators followed 51 study participants with HIV who received kidney transplants from deceased donors with HIV in South Africa.

There is a risk of every fourth heart examined for possible donation being dismissed as unusable due to stress-induced heart failure. But this condition, according to new research, has no bearing on the outcome of a transplant. These results open the way for up to 30% more heart transplant.

Overturning tractors are the leading cause of death for farmers around the world. In order to reduce the rate of overturned tractors, researchers at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT) in Japan have developed a model for understanding the conditions that lead to a tractor overturning from an unlikely source: They based their model on one used to understand the unpredictability of a bouncing ball.

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.