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Are you an expert on lung transplants now? It just might be that lungs get rejected just as often by anyone else, adult or child. Those lungs may have been a bad transplant for anyone. Maybe the person was deceased too long, and the lungs were just unable to recover.
Lungs have one of the shortest time frames for an acceptable transplant. They are one of the most difficult organs to transplant. Cutting down an adult lung to a child's size makes the transplant more difficult. And cutting the lung down in size is not optimal in any situation. Doctors designed the lung transplant protocols for maximizing survival rates and for using scarce transplant organs to produce the best possible outcomes. Doctors were concerned about the problems with transplanting an adult lung into a child which is why they put this protocol into the transplant program.
I hope this second transplant works out for Sarah. But the transplant will not cure her of the fatal disease she suffers from. It may prolong her life. Perhaps there is a cure on the horizon. But Sarah is already in end-stage cystic fibrosis. Which doesn't just affect her lungs.
Wow. just shows liberals really do want death panels.
Excuse me, but somewhere in this great land is the mother of a ten year old, who has two or three younger siblings, in need of a lung transplant.
The judge threw this thirty-something mother under the bus...to go against well-thought and hard-fought protocols that govern lung transplants, and give priority to a ten year old child whose parents mounted a great PR campaign.
What is seen is the little girl who needs new lungs. What is unseen is the person who would have gotten the lungs if not for the little girl and the judge. The little girl's friendly judge ACTED as a death panel for somebody else. I hope she survives and lives a life worthy of the memory of whoever died without the lungs she got.
Will they even bother to announce her death? It seems like the second transplant little detail came out kinda accidentally. They sure didn't make big noise about it like they did the first.
Just how do We know that the second pair of lungs would have went to someone else?
I really want to look at it from a different angle.
Someone who would have had a better survival could have gotten that second pair of lungs.
But,would I feell the same way if the adult in question was a 55 year old who had wmphysema from smoking 3 packs of cigarettes a day? No,in that case she would be the better match,I guess.
Because there are far more people needing transplants than there are organs avaialble!
Quote:
Originally Posted by OICU812
Are you an expert on lung transplants now? It just might be that lungs get rejected just as often by anyone else, adult or child. Those lungs may have been a bad transplant for anyone. Maybe the person was deceased too long, and the lungs were just unable to recover.
I daresay Zimbochick knows far more than you about transplants, given her background.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Spaten_Drinker
This is no worse than wasting a hip transplant on an 80-year old.
Hip transplant? You have to be kidding! A hip replacement is done with artificial parts, for which there is no shortage, and the patient may live another 10-15+ years at age 80. I had a hip replacement last year, and it feels wonderful!
"Sadly, she faces very long odds of surviving. Even with good donor lungs, survival rates are only 50% at six years," says Arthur Caplan, a physician and head of the division of bioethics at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City. "She apparently got low quality organs to try and keep her alive to 'bridge' her to another transplant," Caplan says. "Did it make sense to give her a second set of lungs in a pretty close-to-experimental procedure? She surely needed them, but given her medical situation, should she have been on the adult list in the first place?" Even the idea of getting a second organ transplant is controversial. "If the goal is to save lives with scarce lungs, should retransplants ever be done following an initial acute failure of a first set?" Caplan asks. "I would say no, if others could have used organs who had not had a first shot. That is a tough position, but lung transplants are rare, and not yet on a par with kidney or liver transplants."
Pediatrician G. Kevin Donovan, director of the Edmund D. Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University Medical Center, says it's always difficult to decide how to allocate organs, because it means denying someone a chance at life. But the best way to make those decisions "is probably not to involve the courts," Donovan says. "The courts will have the same sympathy that we all would, but not the same medical information" as doctors at the bedside. "It really is a very difficult case," he says. "And difficult cases make good publicity, but bad precedents."
Are you an expert on lung transplants now? It just might be that lungs get rejected just as often by anyone else, adult or child. Those lungs may have been a bad transplant for anyone. Maybe the person was deceased too long, and the lungs were just unable to recover.
I would bet a million dollars I know a lot more than you, but that's neither here nor there, there is a lot of information available about the primary graft failure that Sarah experienced. About 12% of lung transplant recipients suffer the same condition. What is different in this case is that it is extremely rare for patients with graft failure in lung transplants to receive a second transplant as the available lungs for transplant are scarce, and according to protocol are offered to the next patient on the list, not a failed prior recipient.
All the information is available for your perusal in links throughout this thread.
Because there are far more people needing transplants than there are organs avaialble!
I daresay Zimbochick knows far more than you about transplants, given her background.
Hip transplant? You have to be kidding! A hip replacement is done with artificial parts, for which there is no shortage, and the patient may live another 10-15+ years at age 80. I had a hip replacement last year, and it feels wonderful!
Well by golly you stole that hip from somebody else who coulda used it. lol
As for transplants I'm not sure how the lungs work but livers you are on a list and your scores determine how high up you are in the heirarchy. Matching is not easy at all and there are different levels of the match and how successful it can be. Lungs may be different. She was apparently high enough up to get first dibs after the age limit was lifted. As I posted earlier they are suspending the entire age thing and looking at it on a case by case basis until it can be reviewed. It appears they may have made a mistake. Hopefully some lives can be saved form correcting it. If this kids doctors say she can accept an adult lung (which they did) then she should be given a shot IMO. It's a crap shoot with transplants to begin with.
This is no worse than wasting a hip transplant on an 80-year old.
Not even remotely comparable. People don't get "hip transplants".
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