Medical journals in August brought the suggestion that credit cards could function as donor cards, that a drug could be developed to mimic the effects of exercise, and that kidney recipients with lupus do not fare as well as other patients with renal transplants.
A six-sentence letter to the editor of the British Medical Journal (317:478;1998) caught the attention of news organizations in the United States and Britain when the author suggested that credit cards could double as organ donor cards. The author, Neil Davidson, proposed that such a system could increase the number of donated organs, in part, because most people carry credit cards, but "donor cards are not easy enough to obtain and carry at all times." Dr. Davidson, a consulting physician at Armed Forces Hospital in Kuwait, wrote: "There is a willingness in life to donate organs for transplantation after death, but it is the tiny hindrances to translating that willingness into a consent that is legally binding, rather than the availability of cadavers, that has led to severe shortages of organs." The British Broadcasting Corporation quoted a representative of the British Organ Donor Society as saying that, if such a system were to be implemented, the public must know that donating organs does not represent a financial transaction.
Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas have reported an intriguing finding involving cyclosporine. They used the drug's calcineurin-blocking ability in rats to convert muscle fiber types. The next challenge is to develop a drug that would convert fast muscle to slow muscle, which could benefit patients with muscular diseases and congestive heart failure. Such a drug could "mimic some of the health-promoting benefits of regular exercise," the university said (see News & Publications at www.swmed.edu). The findings were published August 20 in Genes and Development.
A group of 97 kidney recipients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) had more the twice the risk of allograft loss than 97 controls, who had 20 different causes of endstage renal disease, according to a study in August's Arthritis & Rheumatism (41:1438-1445;1998). John H. Stone, MD, MPH, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, found that 52 lupus patients and 37 controls lost their allografts during the six-year follow-up; statistical analysis showed that the relative risk of allograft loss in lupus patients was 2.1 times higher than in controls. However, because renal transplantation can significantly improve the quality of life for many lupus patients, "the results of our study should not be used to deny this procedure to patients with SLE," the authors wrote.
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