There is new hope for patients waiting
for a kidney transplant.
Seventy-thousand Americans are on the
waiting list for a kidney transplant. A
third of them are parked on dialysis
because their antibody levels are too
high for the operation, but News On 6
anchor Jennifer Loren reports for some
people that is no longer a barrier.
"I
used to just sit around and throw up,"
kidney transplant patient Soraya
Kohanzadeh said.
Dialysis is something Soraya
Kohanzadeh would rather forget, but if
telling her story saves lives it's worth
it.
Soraya, like many kidney failure
patients, developed high levels of
anti-donor antibodies through blood
transfusions. Her highly sensitized
immune system would likely reject any
donated kidney.
"Essentially, she would have a very
short, sick life on dialysis," Soraya's
mother Joan Lando said.
But Soraya no longer needs dialysis
thanks to intravenous immunoglobulin
therapy or IVIG. Here's how it works,
during dialysis, patients are given
blood containing a mix of
immunoglobulins, which turn-off the
anti-donor antibodies' attack response
without suppressing the patient's immune
system.
"A significant other of the patient
comes forward, donates an organ, and
there's an incompatibility there. We can
treat the patient and remove those
antibodies. Then the transplant can be
done," Dr. Stanley Jordan, Director of
Nephrology at Cedars-Sinai Medical
Center said.
More than a year after surgery,
Joan's kidney keeps her daughter alive.
"It was sort of shocking to think I
wasn't going to have to just be sick
forever," said Kohanzadeh.
Through their website,
www.sevenluckystars.com, this
mother-daughter team works to spread the
word of a little known therapy that
could save thousands in need of a
kidney.
IVIG is covered by Medicare and can
be used in both living and cadaver-donor
transplants. Nearly 30% of patients on
the kidney transplant list might benefit
from this therapy.
Helping you to
Accept Your New Kidney with
Desensitization Protocols
By nature, your body doesn’t react
well when foreign objects are introduced
into it. It’s safe to say that your body
would consider a new kidney – or perhaps
more precisely, the antigens associated
with that kidney – to be foreign. Your
immune system would produce
organ-rejecting antibodies that would
guarantee transplant failure without a
desensitization treatment protocol prior
to surgery.
Of the 80,000 or so people on the
national transplant waiting list, it’s
estimated that as many as 30% of them
are hyper-sensitive to the markers on
the surface of donor kidneys. Stanford
Hospital’s Kidney Transplant Program is
one of just a handful of medical
facilities nationally with a rigorous
desensitization program for both
deceased and living donor
transplantation.