Lourdes surgery part of kidney swap chain

Wednesday, April 28, 2010, 1:00pm EDT
Lourdes surgery part of kidney swap chain
by John George Staff Writer

The transplant team at Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center in Camden participated this week in what it says is the region’s first successful “four-pair kidney swap chain” involving four donor/recipient pairs.

All four donor surgeries were performed simultaneously Monday at Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center, Saint Barnabas Medical Center, Livingston, N.J.; Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston; and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Concord, N.H.

Once the organs were harvested they were flown by plane to the waiting recipients who received their new kidneys later in the day.

Such “paired kidney exchange” programs offer additional life-saving options to those seeking a kidney transplant, but whose potential living donor is not a good biological match due to either blood type or cross-match incompatibility. In “kidney swap chains” donors agree to have their kidneys go to people who are unrelated, and the loved one they are helping receives a kidney from someone else in the chain. The arrangement increases the number of life-saving surgeries being performed at the same time. Living donor kidney transplants have better outcomes, less rejection and are longer-lasting, making them preferable to deceased-donor transplants, according to hospital officials.

In more transplant news, Dolly Carew, a single mother from Philadelphia, is scheduled to receive a kidney transplant on Friday at Albert Einstein Medical Center thanks to an Internet service.

Carew found a living donor match after signing up with matchingdonors.com, a nonprofit in Massachusetts. Bob Randall, a 44-year-old hardware store owner from Etna Green, Indiana, signed up to be a potential donor after coming across matchingdonors.com on the Internet and deciding to help someone. Randall and Carew met online and discovered they were a match.

“We believe that if more people were better educated on the ability to be a live organ donor, and we add in the personal communication between potential organ donors and patients needing an organ, the number of donors will increase and so will the probability of a patient receiving their much needed organ,” said Dr. Jeremiah Lowney, matchingdonors.com’s medical director. “We already have over 4,170 potential donors on our site waiting to find patients needing organs.”

http://philadelphia.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/blogs/health_care/2010/04/lourdes_surgery_part_of_kidney_swap_chain.html