10:39 PM CST on Sunday, February 15, 2009
RICHARDSON – Jodie Gee hadn’t had a checkup in years. No need. She had been perfectly healthy.
But after persistent urging from her sister, she went for a routine physical last October. A couple of weeks later, she found out she had severe aplastic anemia, a rare bone marrow disorder that can be fatal.
Gee, 34 and a mother of two, now waits for a lifesaving bone marrow Read the rest of this entry »
A team of surgeons from Pittsburgh say they have found a new procedure that will allow them to give Jessica Arrigo a new hand.
Arrigo, 25, of Millville, was 21 when she lost both legs below the knee to amputation and required partial amputations of both her hands after the Norwalk virus ravaged her body.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center surgeons said this week they have developed an alternative approach to the relatively new procedure Read the rest of this entry »
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif.—A jury on Monday began deliberating the fate of a transplant surgeon accused of trying to hasten the death of a patient by giving him excessive dosages of painkillers.
Dr. Hootan Roozrokh of San Francisco faces four years in prison if convicted of felony dependent adult abuse.
The charge stems from his treatment of 25-year-old Ruben Navarro in February 2006 at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center. Navarro, who was Read the rest of this entry »
Dr. Kantrowitz transplanted the heart of a brain-dead baby to another infant Dec. 6, 1967, days after Christiaan Barnard had pioneered the operation in South Africa. The American baby died after six hours.
Dr. Kantrowitz had spent years doing the laboratory work and transplanted hearts in 411 dogs in preparation for a human heart transplant, and he was one of a handful of American physicians who expected to do the first transplant. In fact, 18 months Read the rest of this entry »
She can eat pizza. And hamburgers. She can smell perfume, drink coffee from a cup, and purse her lips as if to blow a kiss.
Except that one lip is hers, and the other is from a dead woman. She is the nation’s first face transplant patient, and on Thursday night, she went home from a Cleveland hospital.
“I’m happy about myself,” she told her doctors.
“She accepted her new face,” said Dr. Maria Siemionow, Read the rest of this entry »
The lawsuit filed last week in Los Angeles County Superior Court by the family’s attorney, Mark Geragos, alleges breach of contract, unfair business practices and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The suit accuses Cigna of delaying and rejecting valid claims, which resulted in the wrongful death of Nataline Sarkisyan.
The Philadelphia-based insurer eventually approved the transplant after Sarkisyan’s family held a rally outside Cigna’s Read the rest of this entry »
“He is doing well, and he is getting better every day,” said Clive Callender, the surgeon who led the team that transplanted a kidney into Barry (D-Ward Friday.
Kim Dickens, the 47-year-old kidney donor, visited him yesterday, said Barry spokeswoman Natalie Williams. Barry’s visitors are otherwise restricted to 24 people who are council members, staff workers, family and clergy.
— Hamil R. Harris
A Capitol Heights man was fatally shot Read the rest of this entry »
LONDON (Reuters) – A Colombian woman has received the world’s first tailor-made trachea transplant, grown by seeding a donor organ with her own stem cells to prevent her body rejecting it, an international research team reported on Wednesday.
The success of the operation, performed in June using tissue generated from the woman’s own bone marrow, raises the prospect that transplanting other organs may be possible without drugs to dampen the immune Read the rest of this entry »
Genzyme Corp.
said Monday the Food and Drug Administration approved its stem cell transplant drug Mozobil and granted the treatment special status protecting it from competition for seven years.
The drug is used for stem cell transplants in patients with the blood cancers non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and multiple myeloma. Mozobil, in combination with growth factor drugs, helps move hematopietic stem cells from a person’s bone marrow into the bloodstream, Read the rest of this entry »
Thursday, December 25, 2008
CANTON, Ohio — An Ohio infant born with a genetic disease that affects just one in every million babies has undergone a rare double lung transplant.
Eight-month-old Elliana Joy White is home for Christmas in Plain Township in Stark County after the operation at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
Elliana was born to Rob and Gina White in April. She couldn’t breathe on her own, and doctors found that she had a Read the rest of this entry »
Friday.