Study shows donor kidneys with toxoplasma do not increase risks for transplant patients

Findings could help expand donor kidney supplies and shorten wait lists

2024-08-09

(Press-News.org) A new study from UC Davis Health could help to increase the supply of donor kidneys.

Researchers have found that transplant patients who receive kidneys infected with the parasite toxoplasma have virtually the same outcomes as those who receive toxoplasma-negative organs.

Despite longstanding concerns, those who received kidneys from toxoplasma antibody positive donors (TPDs) had almost identical mortality and rejection rates. The research was published in Transplant International.

“Organs from donors who were positive for toxoplasma did just as well as organs from those who were negative, both for survival of the patients and survival of the kidneys,” said Lavjay Butani, chief of pediatric nephrology. He coauthored the paper with Daniel Tancredi, professor of pediatrics. “This is quite encouraging.”

Inconsistency in approach Toxoplasma is a ubiquitous parasite that infects many people but generally causes no harm. However, people who are immunosuppressed, such as kidney recipients, could be at higher risk. Toxoplasmosis can be transmitted through the transplanted kidney and reactivate a latent infection in the kidney recipient.

Still, there has been tremendous inconsistency in how transplant centers treat TPD kidneys, with some accepting them and others rejecting.

“We conducted this study because, about a year ago, there was a positive donor and the team did not want to use that kidney for one of our pediatric patients, so we didn’t accept it,” Butani said. “But we realized, we just didn’t have the data to know if that was the correct decision.”

What the study showed The study analyzed 51,000 transplants from the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network database. Of those, 4,300 were TPD. They found rejection and graft failure was 5% for both TPD and non-TPD kidneys. Other measures were similarly aligned. In other words, the TPD kidneys posed no additional risk.

The authors believe it is safe to transplant TPD kidneys — but do recommend additional monitoring. However, transplant patients routinely receive Bactrim, a two-antibiotic combination that is effective against toxoplasma and this may already be mitigating their risk. Most patients receive Bactrim for a year, but that could be extended for TPD cases.

The authors hope this work will help transplant centers unify their TPD policies. UC Davis Health is currently writing new protocols for pediatric transplants. Ultimately, this new understanding could help patients get the organs they desperately need.

“In transplants, kidneys are the greatest need,” Butani said. “Because of increased diabetes, high blood pressure and other conditions, the wait list just gets progressively longer. We hope these findings will help increase the supply of donor kidneys.”

END

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Advanced MRI scans help identify one in three concussion patients with ‘hidden disease’

2024-08-09

Offering patients with concussion a type of brain scan known as diffusion tensor imaging MRI could help identify the one in three people who will experience persistent symptoms that can be life changing, say Cambridge researchers. Around one in 200 people in Europe every year will suffer concussion. In the UK, more than 1 million people attend Emergency Departments annually with a recent head injury. It is the most common form of brain injury worldwide. When a patient in the UK presents at an Emergency Department with head injury, they ...

Psychological bias links good deeds to a belief in God, research says

2024-08-09

Experiments conducted by UC Merced researchers find that people who perform good deeds are far more likely to be thought of as religious believers than atheists. Moreover, the psychological bias linking kindness and helpfulness with faith appears to be global in scale. Research on the mental link between moral behavior and religious belief goes back more than a decade. Prior research, however, emphasized the dark side of this equation, with participants asked whether they assumed it was more probable that a serial killer believed in God or was an atheist (people in nations all over the planet thought the latter ...

Greenland megatsunami led to week-long oscillating fjord wave

2024-08-09

In September 2023, a megatsunami in remote eastern Greenland sent seismic waves around the world, piquing the interest of the global research community. The event created a week-long oscillating wave in Dickson Fjord, according to a new report in The Seismic Record. Angela Carrillo-Ponce of GFZ German Research Centre for Geoscience and her colleagues identified two distinct signals in the seismic data from the event: one high-energy signal caused by the massive rockslide that generated the tsunami, and one very long-period (VLP) signal that lasted over a week. Their analysis of the VLP signal—which was detected as far as 5000 kilometers away—suggests ...

Machine learning approach helps researchers design better gene-delivery vehicles for gene therapy

2024-08-08

Gene therapy could potentially cure genetic diseases but it remains a challenge to package and deliver new genes to specific cells safely and effectively. Existing methods of engineering one of the most commonly used gene-delivery vehicles, adeno-associated viruses (AAV), are often slow and inefficient. Now, researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have developed a machine-learning approach that promises to speed up AAV engineering for gene therapy. The tool helps researchers engineer the protein shells of AAVs, called capsids, to have multiple desirable ...

Bacteria encode hidden genes outside their genome—do we?

2024-08-08

NEW YORK, NY (Aug. 8, 2024) -- Since the genetic code was first deciphered in the 1960s, our genes seemed like an open book. By reading and decoding our chromosomes as linear strings of letters, like sentences in a novel, we can identify the genes in our genome and learn why changes in a gene’s code affect health. This linear rule of life was thought to govern all forms of life—from humans down to bacteria. But a new study by Columbia researchers shows that bacteria break that rule and can create free-floating and ephemeral genes, raising the possibility that similar genes exist outside ...

Assistant professor's $1.1M NASA grant to develop computational tool aiding hypersonic vehicle design

2024-08-08

STARKVILLE, Miss.—NASA is awarding a Mississippi State University assistant professor a $1.13 million grant to develop a new simulation tool to aid the design of hypersonic vehicles used in space exploration. Vilas Shinde of MSU’s Department of Aerospace Engineering won the grant to develop a new flow stability and transition analysis tool, which will aid researchers and aircraft designers in understanding and predicting changes associated with the boundary layer—air flow in the vicinity of an aircraft’s ...

Houston Methodist study shows new, more precise way to deliver medicine to the brain

2024-08-08

Houston Methodist researchers have discovered a more accurate and timely way to deliver life-saving drug therapies to the brain, laying the groundwork for more effective treatment of brain tumors and other neurological diseases. In a study published this month in Communications Biology, an open access journal from Nature Portfolio, investigators used an electric field to infuse medicine from a reservoir outside the brain to specific targets inside the brain. This adds a new dimension to the 30-year-old process of injecting therapeutics into the brain through ...

A ‘thank you’ goes a long way in family relationships

2024-08-08

URBANA, Ill. – You’ve probably heard that cultivating gratitude can boost your happiness. But in marriage and families, it’s not just about being more grateful for your loved ones — it’s also important to feel appreciated by them. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have previously explored the positive impact of perceived gratitude from romantic partners for couples’ relationship quality. In a new study, they show the benefits of perceived gratitude ...

How a legal loophole allows unsafe ingredients in US foods

2024-08-08

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is tasked with overseeing the safety of the U.S. food supply, setting requirements for nutrition labeling, working with companies on food recalls, and responding to outbreaks of foodborne illness. But when it comes to additives already in our food and the safety of certain ingredients, FDA has taken a hand-off approach, according to a new article in the American Journal of Public Health. The current FDA process allows the food industry to regulate itself when it comes to thousands of added ...

USC researchers develop AI model that predicts the accuracy of protein–DNA binding

2024-08-08

A new artificial intelligence model developed by USC researchers and published in Nature Methods can predict how different proteins may bind to DNA with accuracy across different types of protein, a technological advance that promises to reduce the time required to develop new drugs and other medical treatments. The tool, called Deep Predictor of Binding Specificity (DeepPBS), is a geometric deep learning model designed to predict protein–DNA binding specificity from protein–DNA complex structures. DeepPBS ...

1 in 4 U.S. veterans aged 60+ report having being diagnosed with cardiovascular disease at some point, with potential implications for their physical and mental health

NRG Oncology adds new theranostics subcommittee to organization, new leadership members for CCDR and early phase trial oversight committees

New NEJM Perspective article highlights urgent need for widespread adoption of Fracture Liaison Services (FLS) to combat rising burden of osteoporosis-related fractures

Study shows donor kidneys with toxoplasma do not increase risks for transplant patients

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: