Kidney donor reaches century mark

[okarol]

Kidney donor reaches century mark

By Yadira Betances
THE EAGLE-TRIBUNE (NORTH ANDOVER, Mass.)

LAWRENCE, Mass.— It appears Massachusetts' oldest organ donor will outlive most of us.

Noah Dupont turned 100 Saturday, almost 40 years after donating a kidney to his son Ronald.

Organ donors tend to live longer than the average American because donors have to be in top health to give up an organ. But doctors said Dupont is a bit of an oddity.

"I think it's amazing," said Dr. Stefan Tullius, chief of the division of transplant surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. "Not a lot of kidney donors are living to 100 and the fact that he did this at a time when it (a transplant) wasn't common is fantastic."

Ronald Dupont died of cancer in 2004. Tullius said he, too, outlived the expectancy of a transplant survivor, which is 20 to 30 years.

Ronald Dupont was 19 when he was diagnosed with kidney disease, but he waited two years to tell his family. By then, his kidneys had failed and he was near death.

Noah Dupont didn't hesitate to offer a kidney to save his youngest son, even though he had had his gall bladder and appendix removed a month earlier.

The elder Dupont was healthier than men 20 years his junior, doctors said, and as luck would have it in 1970, the drug cyclosporine was in clinical trials in Boston, at what is now Brigham and Women's Hospital. Cyclosporine is a drug that fights organ rejection by reducing the activity of the patient's immune system.

"That was a major difference leading to the success and treatment of rejection, which increased the recipients' survival rate by 20 to 30 percent," Tullius said.

Noah Dupont "never gave it a second thought," he said. He just wanted "to give my son a new life."

And so, he did. Ronald Dupont lived to marry, father two sons and became a supervisor at the former AT&T in North Andover. He was 58 when he died of cancer.

"It's a great thing to donate an organ," Tullius said. "When you unselfishly find people willing to do that without interest and compensation, it's wonderful."

Noah Dupont, who had polio as a boy and in recent years has undergone a heart triple bypass and brain surgery, is still in a unique category because of his age and health history, Tullius said. Tullius believes Dupont to be the oldest organ donor in Massachusetts today.

The centenarian said the secret of his longevity is his Catholic faith - he recites the rosary seven times a day and attends Mass at St. Patrick Church on Sunday - cod liver oil for energy and red wine, proven to lower the risk of heart attacks.

His family keeps him young, too. He has three daughters — Claire Valcourt of Haverhill, Andrea Dupont of Portsmouth, N.H., and Marguerite Mesiti of Chelmsford — as well as 13 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren. The oldest of eight, he has four living siblings — Jerry of Derry, N.H., Emil of Maryland and Connie Boutin and Doris McGurn, both of Arizona. His wife of 56 years, Germain, died in 1996.

Noah Dupont has lived in the same house in Lawrence since 1925. Like many back in the day, he left school in sixth-grade to work in local mills and later with the railroad. He worked as a plumber with his father, before going to work for his brother at Dupont Motors, a Lawrence car dealership. He retired from Fort Devens as a rebuild agent.

He said he has had a full life, having built a race car and airplane and traveled to 45 states over the years.

The one thing he has yet to do is hit the Lottery, which he plays regularly, he said.

"I'd give the money to my kids and have them enjoy life."

Yadira Betances writes for The Eagle-Tribune in North Andover, Mass.


About kidney donation

Kidneys are the most donated organs for transplants, due to the high incidence of kidney disease, which rose by 30 percent last year, according to The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Other facts:

The first successful kidney transplant was done in 1954 at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, now known as Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

From 1988 to 2007, 3,114 kidneys were transplanted from living donors in Massachusetts and 4,218 from deceased donors.

The survival rate for kidney transplants for patients ages 35 to 49 is 97.9 percent one year after surgery.

Kidneys can come from a living donor related or unrelated to the recipient or from a deceased donor.

The first laparoscopic live donor transplant was done in 1995 at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. In this procedure, a telescopic lens system is inserted through a small incision.

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