Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Uterus Removed After First-In-The-Nation Transplant Fails
The first uterus transplant in the United States has failed, and the organ was surgically removed on Tuesday, officials at the Cleveland Clinic said on Wednesday. The recipient, a 26-year-old woman, suddenly developed a serious complication on Tuesday, according to Eileen Sheil, a spokeswoman for the clinic. She did not specify the nature of the problem but said the uterus was being analyzed by pathologists to determine what went wrong. (Grady, 3/9)
A woman who received the nation's first uterus transplant last month at the Cleveland Clinic has had a "sudden complication" and had to have the donated organ removed, the hospital reported today. (Zeltner, 3/9)
The nation's first uterus transplant has failed, the Cleveland Clinic announced Wednesday, saying doctors had removed the organ. A 26-year-old woman received the transplant on Feb. 24 and seemed to be doing well, even appearing briefly at a news conference on Monday with her surgeons. (3/9)
In other donation news, research finds that a new method might help cut wait times and increase the success rate of kidney transplants —
In the anguishing wait for a new kidney, tens of thousands of patients on waiting lists may never find a match because their immune systems will reject almost any transplanted organ. Now, in a large national study that experts are calling revolutionary, researchers have found a way to get them the desperately needed procedure. In the new study, published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, doctors successfully altered patients’ immune systems to allow them to accept kidneys from incompatible donors. Significantly more of those patients were still alive after eight years than patients who had remained on waiting lists or received a kidney transplanted from a deceased donor. (Kolata, 3/9)
Nearly 1 in 3 patients who needs a kidney transplant is especially hard to match, and new research suggests a painstaking treatment to help those patients tolerate an incompatible organ is worth considering. More hospitals have begun offering so-called desensitization therapy to help high-risk patients who have a willing but non-matching living donor receive an organ their bodies otherwise would reject. Some specialty centers have reported success but it wasn't clear how well the approach would work when used widely. (Neergaard, 3/10)
