Recent journal articles focused on patient and graft survival following pancreas and kidney transplantation and on the importance of identifying specific types of cardiomyopathy.
* Patient and graft survival is similar regardless of whether diabetic patients undergo living related kidney transplantation or simultaneous pancreas-kidney transplantation, Stephen C. Rayhill, MD, and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin Medical School in Madison reported in March in Annals of Surgery (2000;231:417-423). However, the rates were significantly lower in diabetic patients who received cadaveric kidneys. The cadaveric kidney recipients were about 10 years older and had received dialysis longer than the other patients before their transplants. The study looked at 130 living related kidney transplants, 379 simultaneous pancreas-kidney transplants, and 296 cadaveric kidney transplants conducted from January 1986 through January 1996.
* On April 13 in The New England Journal of Medicine, G. Michael Felker, MD, and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University explored the prognostic value of identifying the underlying cause of heart failure in patients with cardiomyopathy (2000;342:1077-1084). They were able to find a cause in half of 1230 patients who were referred to their center with unexplained cardiomyopathy. Peripartum cardiomyopathy had a better long-term prognosis than other forms of cardiomyopathy. "The accurate assessment of prognosis…is critical, to ensure that patients with the most severe disease receive appropriate consideration for the limited number of hearts available for transplantation," the authors said.
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