Plans underway for 2010
"Celebrate Life from the Heart" Gala
The Living Bank’s annual gala is set for October 2, 2010, at the Omni Hotel in Houston. Honorees for the “Celebrate Life from the Heart” gathering are renowned heart surgeon, Dr. Denton A. Cooley, and the founders of the JLH Foundation, Paula L. Hern and Tom D. Barbour, major supporters of organ transplantation. Co-chairs for the event are Mary and Dr. David L.S. Morales. Mary, a social worker with a background in transplantation and David, a heart transplant surgeon at Texas Children’s Hospital, are co-chairing with Shannon and Mark A. Wallace. Shannon is a dietitian, and Mark is president/CEO of TCH. |
of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian award; the Rene Leriche Prize, the highest honor of the International Surgical Society; the Distinguished Service Award of the American Medical Association; and the American Surgical Association’s 2010 Medallion of Scientific Achievement. The JLH Foundation and its founders, Paula L. Hern and Tom D. Barbour, support a broad range of trans- plantation-related organizations, including The Living Bank, The Methodist Hospital, St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital, The Texas Heart Institute, Texas Children’s Hospital and Memorial Hermann Hospital. |
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Dr. Cooley, who turns 90 this year, inspired the founding of The Living Bank in 1968, the first organ donor registry. It was the same year he performed the first successful heart transplant in the U.S. |
John L. Hern, Paula’s father, received a heart transplant at the Methodist DeBakey Heart and Vascular Center. While there, he became determined to help others who could not afford a transplant. |
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Dr. Cooley is president emeritus and surgeon-in-chief of The Texas Heart Institute, and an icon of the medical estalishment and of Houston. Among his more than 120 honors and awards are the National Medal of Technology; the Presidential Medal |
Paula and her husband, Tom, have fulfilled that wish through the JLH Foundation’s generous philanthropy. For information about the gala, please contact Melissa Spell at 1-800-528-2971 or at mspell@livingbank.org. |
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Independent |
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Transplant independent living donor advocates (TILDA) are rare in the transplant world. When The Living Bank established a program in 2009 called The Living Donor Bank, it offered me an opportunity to become a TILDA. I was intrigued for several reasons. First, my background as a licensed professional counselor (LPC) has focused on trauma and working with patients who have chronic illness. Second, when I attended a national conference of donor advocates, only two transplant organizations, The Living Bank and a hospital in New Jersey, utilized a TILDA. Most hospitals have an in-house advocate for the recipient and the donor. Medicare requires that the two positions be independent of each other. By having an outside advocate, a TILDA, an additional level of scrutiny is added when a living donor offers to give an organ, in most cases, a kidney. When a potential donor is a relative or close acquaintance, a certain comfort level usually exists. However, even in these situations, a TILDA provides a living donor an opportunity to discuss more freely any fears or feelings of pressure. By utilizing a TILDA rather than an in-house advocate, transplant centers are able to disengage more fully from contact with the living donor. The TILDA is charged with protecting donor rights. By raising the comfort level and adding a layer of counseling for the living donor, the recipient and transplant centers also benefit significantly. The certainty that a recipient’s transplant will come from a healthy person is also increased. Recipients receive additional protection from a potential donor who has an agenda, such as someone wanting payment or personal relationship that is inappropriate. The TILDA also gives transplant centers an extra safety shield when dealing with altruistic donors, in particular, i.e., donors unrelated to the recipient either as family or as a close acquaintance. At The Living Bank, we think the concept of engaging a TILDA is in the best interest of the donor, the recipient and the transplant center. |
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Kidney donors |
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Starting the chain Nationwide, fewer than one-quarter of dialysis patients ages 18 to 54 are well enough to work or go to school. About one in five people on dialysis die each year, most often of heart disease or infections. Estimates suggest that about a third of people needing a kidney transplant have a relative or friend who's willing to donate but incompatible with them, said Reece. If those people can participate in a swap of two or more pairs, or a chain started by a no-strings-attached donor, it solves their problem and gets the recipient off the long waiting list for a deceased donor kidney. As of June, there are 85,296 people on the national waiting list. In 2009, 16,831 kidneys were transplanted nationwide, 62 percent from deceased donors and 38 percent from living donors. Strong must work out some details before joining chains and swaps. Transplant centers can contract with any of a half-dozen private matching agencies that make the chains of surgeries possible. Strong has contracted with the network started in 2006 by transplant surgeon Dr. Michael A. Rees of the University of Toledo Medical Center. Rees came up with the idea of using an altruistic donor - someone not connected to a needy recipient but who's willing to give up a kidney to whomever is chosen to receive it - to start chains of kidney transplants that didn't have to be performed simultaneously. The Alliance so far has arranged 10 of those, as well as 40 simultaneous two-way loops and three- way exchanges. "It's brilliant on so many different levels, and yet so simple," said Dr. Jeffrey Veale, Murray Thomas' transplant surgeon and director of the University of California, Los Angeles Kidney Transplantation Exchange Program, which has been part of more than 30 chains since 2008. His program contracts with a different matching service, the National Kidney Registry, which lined up the Thomases' chain. Murray Thomas' new kidney came from an altruistic female donor in Illinois who started the chain with the goal of helping multiple people. She and three other altruistic donors helped launch Loyola University Medical Center's Pay-it-Forward Kidney Donation Program in March. News about it has prompted 21 more good Samaritan donors to step forward in that Chicago region. Thomas could receive the generous woman's kidney because his sister has promised to donate to the next person in the chain - a man in Utah. In turn, that man's wife donated a kidney for a New Jersey man. And on it went. Such chains could theoretically go forever, but typically they include a half-dozen pairs. Continue... |
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Chris Swingle - Staff writer CSWINGLE@DemocratandChronicle.com Jeananne Thomas, 49, donated a kidney May 4 at UCLA Medical Center in California as part of a chain of pairs that included her brother G. Murray Thomas, who needed a kidney. To get a kidney for her brother, Thomas donated one of hers to a stranger in Utah. |
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Thomas' blood type wasn't a good match for her brother, so first she was told she couldn't solve his polycystic kidney disease. For seven years, G. Murray Thomas depended on hours of kidney dialysis three times a week- and waited, because there is a huge shortage of deceased donor kidneys. But then Jeananne Thomas heard of a newer approach that strings together pairs of needy recipients and their living, medically incompatible relatives or friends who can be a good match for someone else. Thomas, 49, of Rochester, traveled cross-country in May as part of a 10-person chain of kidney donations and transplants that benefited five people, including her brother. Strong Memorial Hospital, the Rochester region's only transplant center, hasn't yet participated in these kidney chains. But in six months it will. Strong, which is part of the University of Rochester Medical Center, joined a 30-state private network of about 80 transplant centers called Alliance for Paired Donation multi-city, pay-it-forward kidney donation chains. Strong will be getting involved just as a federal pilot program will begin linking Alliance's patient/donor database with some of the half-dozen other matching services, which could provide even more possible matches. The need is great. Rising rates of diabetes and hypertension, driven by obesity, and longer lives, have resulted in more kidney disease, making it the most needed organ for transplant. Currently 331 people are on the waiting list at Strong for a kidney transplant, including 101 people who have been waiting for at least three years. In all of 2009, 64 kidney transplants were done at Strong. Nearly half of those kidneys came from deceased donors (brain-dead patients who were on life support before their death). The remainder came directly from a relative, partner or friend who knew the recipient and was a good match. Soon, Strong's patients who have a healthy, willing donor can be added into Alliance's database of nearly 200 people - other incompatible donor-recipient pairs - for attempts at computer matching based on age, location, blood type, tissue typing and other immunological characteristics. "It's a huge benefit to our patients," says Dr. Carlos Marroquin, Kidney and Pancreas Program director and one of four kidney transplant surgeons at Strong. "We're excited to have them," Laurie Reece, executive director of the Ohio-based Alliance, said of the Rochester hospital. "It does give hope to people, and that's a good thing." |
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| Kidney | 85,261 | Kidney/Pancreas | 2,020 | Heart/Lung | 78 |
| Liver | 16,019 | Heart | 3,143 | Intestine | 241 |
| Pancreas | 1,450 | Lung | 1,802 | All Organs | 107,832 |
