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Factors influencing outcomes in clinical transplantation 1

Part 1 of 2
Published on September 29, 2021   47 min

Other Talks in the Series: The Immune System - Key Concepts and Questions

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0:00
A very warm welcome to this lecture on transplantation, where in this session we're going to look at the factors influencing outcomes in clinical transplantation. My name is Kathryn Wood, I'm Professor Emerita of Immunology at the University of Oxford, where I work with my team in the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences alongside the clinical transplant team. In the first part of this talk I'm going to cover aspects that affect outcomes in clinical transplantation.
0:29
Transplantation is a very important part of modern medicine, and with organ failure or organ diseases becoming more prevalent, particularly (for example) diabetes and kidney failure, the number of patients who are waiting for a transplant is ever-increasing. I've retrieved some of the facts from the organ sharing and database systems available in the US, the UK, and Eurotransplant, to illustrate these facts. In the United States, a patient is added to the waiting list for a transplant every ten minutes. When I did the survey most recently, there were 114,000-plus patients waiting for a transplant, that is patients who are well enough to be listed as eligible for a transplant, if an organ donor becomes available. Also, obviously because there is an organ shortage - in other words, insufficient donors for every person who would benefit, potentially, from receiving an organ transplant - on average, 20 people die every day while waiting for a transplant. Largely, these are people who need a heart transplant or a liver transplant, but even kidney transplant patients can become so unwell they are longer be eligible for a transplant, so a large number of people are dying every day while on the transplant waiting lists. Having said that, a more positive outlook is that there are a large number of transplants being performed in most countries around the world now, very successfully with good outcomes, as I'll illustrate as we go through this talk. These are the latest data available from the various databases, in fact, each of the countries updates their information annually, and you can find this on a number of different websites available to the general public. In 2020, in the United States, there were over 39,000 transplants performed. In the UK, in 2020, there were 4,761 transplants performed, and in Eurotransplant, which is an organisation that covers a number of different countries in Europe, there were 6,356 transplants performed. A large number of people are being helped because of the gift of life being provided by individuals who wish to donate their organs for transplantation after their own death, and this is a very important element of treating patients with end-stage organ failure.

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Factors influencing outcomes in clinical transplantation 1

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