Check out this Wall Street Journal article linked to here titled, "Lab-Made Trachea Saves Man," which discusses how Swedish physicians transplanted an artificial windpipe lined with the man's own stemcells into a man who was close to death because of a large tumor and now is doing well after receiving the transplant just a few weeks ago on June, 9th. There is no sign of rejection.
This is very important to the field of transplantation in general because this is the first time a windpipe has been successfully transplanted without it coming from a cadaver, or a deceased person. Therefore, this renews hope for other artificial tissues and organs to be successfully transplanted into the human body, and thus, hopefully saving many lives.
Also, this leads me to muse about possible (but unknown practical applicability)of covering donated organs and tissues with the patients own stem cells to lower the chance of the body rejecting the donated organ or tissue. This issue is briefly discussed in a Bloomberg article linked to here about this first artificially made windpipe successfully implanted into a human.
This is an exciting new frontier in the field of transplantation. In fact, we might call this the field of implantation because organs are only being implanted, not transplanted because the windpipe was not taken from a human donor.
Friday, July 8, 2011
Monday, July 4, 2011
ESRD Disease Management: Is it Posssible?
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services approved 3 demonstrations projects to study health outcomes along with and economic costs of health management for ESRD patients who were enrolled in these projects (the intervention cohort) compared to populations that were not enrolled in the demo projects (the other cohort). The Evaluation report for the first 3 years of the 5 years demonstration projects in its entirety is found here.
The results were mixed - both in terms of health outcomes and cost savings.
The question is does disease management not work for ESRD populations or was there something wrong with the demo intervention designs (study design error) which caused these results?
I hope and believe that ESRD health management interventions can be designed to improve health outcomes for patients and also be (at least) budget neutral.
Practices from a country such as Italy which has much better ESRD health outcomes (See an older post here where this is discussed) should be used here in the U.S. to improves our ESRD health outcomes.
Also, we can study physicians and medical centers in the U.S. who have better than expected health outcomes with their ESRD populations and transfer their practices and protocols to the rest of the healthcare professionals who treat ESRD populations so that a ESRD health management intervention can designed which imoroves both the life expectancy and quality of life of the ESRD population in the U.S.
The results were mixed - both in terms of health outcomes and cost savings.
The question is does disease management not work for ESRD populations or was there something wrong with the demo intervention designs (study design error) which caused these results?
I hope and believe that ESRD health management interventions can be designed to improve health outcomes for patients and also be (at least) budget neutral.
Practices from a country such as Italy which has much better ESRD health outcomes (See an older post here where this is discussed) should be used here in the U.S. to improves our ESRD health outcomes.
Also, we can study physicians and medical centers in the U.S. who have better than expected health outcomes with their ESRD populations and transfer their practices and protocols to the rest of the healthcare professionals who treat ESRD populations so that a ESRD health management intervention can designed which imoroves both the life expectancy and quality of life of the ESRD population in the U.S.
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