Common Liver Diseases and Transplantation: An Algorithmic Approach to Work Up and Management provides a review of liver diseases and transplantation that is comprehensive enough to provide an intellectual basis for the data, yet simple enough to be read and assimilate into clinical practice rapidly. Common Liver Diseases and Transplantation by Dr. Robert S. Brown Jr is written with an intended flow and structure. The early chapters are summaries on topics such as early and late liver disease, workup and diagnosis, and pre- and post-transplant problems. The chapters that follow are liver disease-specific and cover the liver diseases physicians will encounter in their patients. The in-depth chapters provide disease-specific epidemiology and outcomes, as well as diagnostic tables and more detailed algorithms and management approaches. With two decades worth of teaching liver disease both formally as well as in rounds and informal "chalk talks" with residents and fellows, Dr. Robert S. Brown Jr presents a way to think about clinical liver problems with a simple algorithmic method. Common Liver Diseases and Transplantation: An Algorithmic Approach to Work Up and Management will serve as a useful resource for gastroenterologists, fellows, medical students, internists, and internal medicine residents.

Advances in heart surgical treatment have been impressive in the last 15 years. In end-stage heart disease, procedures are now performed routinely which were only experimental one or two decades ago. Heart transplantation has become a well-established procedure. According to the Gen eral Registry of the International Society of Heart and Lung Transplantation. 40,738 heart transplantations had been performed through the end of 1997 with survival rates of 78 % at one year, 65 % at five years, and 42 % at ten years. The progress in this field has been due to intense efforts in understanding and modulating immune responses to the trans planted heart, to elaborate therapeutic strategies to constrain infections, and to improved out-patient care. Accordingly, heart transplantation is integrated into the facilities of the health care systems, the routine of physicians, and the awareness of patients. The resulting increase in potential organ recipients has not been met, however, by an equivalent increase of available donor organs. This increasing discrepancy has forced the technical improvement and clinical evalua tion of mechanical circulatory support systems as an option for treatment of critically ill patients with a failing heart. Initially, these assist devices were only used to maintain sufficient circulation in post-cardiotomy heart failure until myocardial function had recov ered. Since the late 1980s, their primary use has been that of bridging patients with heart failure until a suitable organ is available so that heart transplantation can be performed."

Main focus of the new book will be the description and discussion of rat and mouse models for organ transplantation. Various microsurgical techniques will be presented which allow transplantation of functional organs in syngeneic systems. In particular, the extremely difficult methods necessary for organ transplantation in mice will be presented and evaluated. Besides these practical aspects the book will also cover the theoretical sides of organ transplantation like the immunobiology of allotransplantation. Special emphasis will be given to the resurgent field of xenotransplantation. The results from xenograft models developed in the recent years using rats or mice will be reviewed and their impact on future human xenotransplantation will be discussed.

Ethical Problems in Dialysis and Transplantation presents an overview of issues with which nephrologists and decision makers are confronted in their daily practice. The search for a universal system of ethics and theories of justice are addressed. Furthermore the work provides a normative ethical discussion of ways of distributing resources with a view to selection and commercialization. Others chapters discuss a philosophical and religious analysis of stopping treatment and the clinical and ethical aspects of stopping treatment in dialysis. Different views from different countries on the subject of dialysis and transplantation are covered including the views expressed by contributors from India, Africa, Japan, Great Britain and China. The work presents the clinician with a guide to the ethical considerations underlying the treatment of dialysis and renal transplantation patients.

Clinical Management of Renal Transplantation presents The Belfast City and University Hospital experience in renal transplantation. Over the years, the Belfast Renal Transplant Unit has acquired considerable experience in all aspects of renal transplantation which have led to excellent results. The team working in the Belfast Renal Transplant Unit has built up an outstanding reputation which has become widely known. This volume is a comprehensive, practical reference work for senior medical students and nurses as well as for the established nephrologist and transplantation surgeon. It provides a clear and concise picture of the care needed by patients who are being prepared for renal transplantation or who have recently received a kidney transplant.

Is the nephrology community facilitating excess cardiovascular deaths in patients with kidney failure and anemia by treating to a subnormal hematocrit? Why have clinicians and nephrologists permitted health insurance companies and the government to decide when anemia therapy should begin in persons with progressive kidney failure? Is iron the only variable that can be manipulated to maximize response to recombinant erythropoietin? Are we using too much intravenous iron in kidney failure patients, and is oral iron supplementation worthless in sustaining iron stores during long-term erythropoietin treatment? When does left ventricular hypertrophy begin to emerge in patients with progressive renal disease and is there convincing evidence that anemia is a significant cause of LVH in this setting? Is darbepoetin alfa, a new novel, long-acting erythropoietin, really superior to recombinant erythropoietin? This book is a compilation of proceedings from a conference in Brooklyn convened to address these and other controversial and unresolved issues in renal anemia management.

Internationally recognized scientists, clinicians, and technologists review and explain the fundamental molecular and cellular biology that has been applied to the emerging field of transplant immunology and xenotransplantation, and what impact these advances might optimally have on medicine and science. The authoritative experts writing here-many of whom made the basic discoveries underlying the recent advances-examine the biological and immunological hurdles to xenotransplantation, illuminating how the immune system interacts with the xenograft and laying a practical foundation for the use of genetic engineering and animal transplants in the treatment of human disease.

This book covers all topics related to the imaging of organ transplantation. The main part of the book offers in-depth coverage of heart, renal, liver, lung, bone marrow and pancreatic and intestinal transplantation. Each of these topics is discussed firstly in a clinical chapter and then in a radiological chapter. This unique and superbly illustrated volume will be of great assistance to all who work in this field.

MSC (mesenchymal stem cells) have been reported to initiate revascularization after injury, to facilitate engraftment of blood-forming stem cells, and to reduce the incidence of graft-vs. host disease through their immune-suppressive qualities. Finally, bone marrow-derived MSC have been reported to home to areas of solid tumor revascularization, and thus may be used as delivery vehicles to target ablative agents into dividing tumor cells. Recently the characteristics of human MSC from adipose (fat) tissue have also been identified. The possibility of repairing tissues, speeding stem cell engraftment, and targeting solid tumors for specific killing, using MSC easily harvested from bone marrow, or better yet, from unwanted fat tissue, holds broad appeal, and is an intriguing possibility that could have dramatic effect on health care.

This book has information on how to isolate, grow, and characterize MSC from marrow and fat, and gives important insight into how these cells may be used for gene delivery and cellular therapies in the future. Updates on emerging clinical trials are given.

Developed by the Blood and Marrow Transplant team at Oregon Health & Science University Knight Cancer Institute, this pocket guide provides management guidelines for hematopoietic stem cell transplant patients from the moment of their initial consultation throughout the transplant process. It includes indications for transplant, essential details for patient/donor evaluation, recommendations for management of complications during and after transplant, and guidelines for long-term follow up as well as step-by-step instructions for common procedures and documentation guidelines.

An essential tool for providers, this guide presents a multidisciplinary approach to information you will need to provide quality care for your patients.

Surgical Management of Heart Failure brings together the current knowledge on the surgical management of heart failure into one volume. It is designed to have copious illustrations and photographic material that will explain the techniques and surgical management of patients with heart failure in an effective modern format.

This book deals with organ failure and the way it can be managed artificially without requiring a transplant. Written by a mixture of European and US physicians and surgeons, each of the chapters compares the artificial organ to what is currently available from the transplant point of view to highlight the current and modern available techniques for organ replacement.

The book will be a useful reading for postgraduate students and people interested in modern surgical and medical technology.

With detailed contributions from more than 40 leading authorities on the topic, this Third Edition comprehensively explores the immunobiology, pathophysiology, and clinical manifestations of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD)-offering sections revealing the most up-to-date research on immune activation and dysregulation, the pathophysiology of target organ damage, and GVHD prevention and treatment.

Kidney Transplantation: A Guide to the Care of Transplant Recipients is an easy to read, up to date, clinical resource written by experts in the field of kidney transplantation. The book explains how donors and recipients are selected for transplantation, how the surgical procedure is performed, and how the experts recognize and treat rejection.

Clearly illustrated chapters show how the immune system works in the setting of transplantation and how immunosuppressive medications prevent rejection of the transplanted kidney; knowledge essential for the proper care of the transplant recipient.

The acute and long-term care of the patient is described from the perspective not only of proper immunosuppressive medication management, but also from the perspective of comorbidities most common to transplanted patients, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes mellitus, infectious diseases, malignancies, and bone disease. Special issues that impact the care of the transplant recipient, such as unusual donor sources, nonadherence and insurability are also addressed in separate chapters.

This comprehensive practical guide to transplant patient care is an essential source for the practicing community nephrologist that cares for transplanted patients, as well as medical and surgical residents and fellows in training.

Clear illustrations as well a therapeutic algorithms complement the text, making this an easy to read, up to date source on the clinical practice of kidney transplantation.

Increased recognition of the overlap between critical care and renal medicine, and recent advances in the understanding of acute renal failure and the application of renal replacement therapies, have brought increased attention to the nephrologist's role in the intensive care unit (ICU). This book is written to provide an approach for the resident in nephrology, at any level of training, with regards to critically ill patients. This text provides the information necessary to provide care for the nephrology patient in the ICU.

This book provides a detailed account of the principles and practice of contemporary lung transplantation. An accomplished, international team of contributing authors have combined their expertise to provide scientific developments and clinical knowledge based on their extensive experience. The book covers pulmonary vascular and parenchymal lung disease, which necessitate transplantation, together with all aspects of the multidisciplinary management of lung transplant patients. It concludes by looking at future developments in the treatment of advanced respiratory failure. This multidisciplinary approach makes the publication suitable for several subspecialities in addition to pulmonary medicine and lung transplantation, including haematology, radiology and clinical psychology. It will serve as a valuable source of reference and practical information for medical specialists in transplantation and all those working in thoracic organ transplant units.

Perhaps no medical breakthrough in the twentieth century is more spectacular, more hope-giving, or more fraught with ethical questions than organ transplantation. Each year some 25,000 Americans are pulled back from the brink of death by receiving vital new organs. Another 5,000 die while waiting for them. And what distinguishes these two groups has become the source of one of our thorniest ethical questions.
In Raising the Dead, Ronald Munson offers a vivid, often wrenchingly dramatic account of how transplants are performed, how we decide who receives them, and how we engage the entire range of tough issues that arise because of them. Each chapter begins with a detailed account of a specific case--Mickey Mantle's controversial liver transplant, for example--followed by careful analysis of its surrounding ethical questions (the charges that Mantle received special treatment because he was a celebrity, the larger problems involving how organs are allocated, and whether alcoholics should have an equal claim on donor livers). In approaching transplant ethics through specific cases, Munson reminds us of the complex personal and emotional dimension that underlies such issues. The book also ranges beyond our present capabilities to explore the future possibilities in xenotransplantation (transplanting animal organs into humans) and stem cell technology that would allow doctors to grow new organs from the patient's own cells.
Based on extensive scientific research, but written with a novelist's eye for the human condition, Raising the Dead shows readers the reality of organ transplantation now, the possibility of what it may become, and how we might respond to the ethical challenges it forces us to confront.

This book is serving the surgical trainee and the experienced transplant surgeon as a compendium of the various topics in split liver grafting. It is comprised of articles by faculty members of the first International Course on Split Liver Transplantation. Covering the main aspects of Split Liver Transplantation, this excellent volume helps livertransplant-surgeons select the best technique and getting aware of pitfalls. Detailed instructions on the different procedures are round off by an overview on technical development, status quo as well as the experience to date.

A beautifully written and compelling memoir of a largely unexplored area of medicine: transplant surgery. Leading transplant surgeon Dr Joshua Mezrich creates life from loss, moving organs from one body to another. In this intimate, profoundly moving work, he examines more than one hundred years of remarkable medical breakthroughs, connecting this fascinating history with the stories of his own patients. Gripping and evocative, How Death Becomes Life takes us inside the operating room and presents the stark dilemmas that transplant surgeons must face daily: How much risk should a healthy person be allowed to take to save someone she loves? Should a patient suffering from alcoholism receive a healthy liver? The human story behind the most exceptional medicine of our time, Mezrich's riveting book is a poignant reminder that a life lost can also offer the hope of a new beginning.

The first experiments with neural transplantation into the brain (for a review, see Bjorklund and Stenevi 1985) were reported at the end of the last century by Thompson (1890), who took cortical tissue from adult cats and implanted the tissue pieces into the neocortex of adult dogs. The neurons did not survive, but the transplanted mass did not disintegrate entirely. Successful graft ing into the brain was reported later by Ranson (1909), who implanted spinal ganglia into the cerebral cortex of developing rats, and by Dunn (1917), who reported survival of implanted neonatal cortex into the cortex of newborn recipients. Another important step was made by Le Gros Clark (1940) who reported that, in the rabbit, embryonic (E) cortical tissue could be successfully grafted into the cortex of young recipients. Ex periments by Wallace and Das (1982), and Bjorklund and Stenevi (1984), showing behavioral effects of grafts, subsequently stimu lated a growing interest in neurotransplantation research. Intrac erebral grafting is now considered a powerful tool for addressing fundamental questions about development, regenerative, or re storative phenomena in the central nervous system (CNS) and is a potential therapy for neurodegenerative diseases.

When Joseph Murray performed the first successful living kidney donor transplant in 1954, he thought this would be a temporary stopgap. Today, we are no closer to the goal of adequate organ supply without living donors-if anything, the supply-demand ratio is worse. While most research on the ethics of organ transplantation focuses on how to allocate organs as a scarce medical resource, the ethical treatment of organ donors themselves has been relatively neglected. In The Living Organ Donor as Patient: Theory and Practice, Lainie Friedman Ross and J. Richard Thistlethwaite, Jr. argue that living donor organ transplantation can be ethical provided that we treat living solid organ donors as patients in their own right. Ross and Thistlethwaite develop a five-principle framework to examine some of the attempts to increase living donation. It uses the three principles of the Belmont Report: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice modified to organ transplantation, as well as the principles of vulnerability and special relationships creating special obligations. Their approach requires that the transplant community fully embrace current and prospective living organ donors as patients to whom we have special obligations. Only when living organ donors are regarded as patients in their own right and have a living donor advocate team dedicated to their well-being can the moral limits of living solid organ donation be realized and living donors be given the full respect and care they deserve.

This supplement to "TRANSPLANT International" contains a most recent update of clinical and experimental research in transplantation and experiences with all modern immunosuppressive drugs, presented at the 7th Congress of the European Society of Organ Transplantation in Vienna in October 1995. The book has relevant information on clinical transplantation of kidneys, livers, hearts and pancreases as well as basic research data of immunbiology and organ preservation. More than 80% of the contributions were generated by respected European research institutions and therefore the book provides a comprehensive overview of European activities in transplantation research.

Biliary tract complications are still the major cause of morbidity following orthotopic liver transplantation. This book deals systematically with the large variety of possible cholangiographic changes. The figures are the results of a review of cholangiograms from more than 280 patients who underwent orthotopic liver transplantation. The etiology, clinical aspects, and treatment of these complications are reviewed on the basis of the authors' experience in radiology, endoscopy, and transplant surgery.

With all the complex issues of acceptance or rejection of a transplanted organ, immunology is a key subject for all transplantation clinicians. During recent years, there has been an explosion of research and knowledge in this area. Produced in association with the American Society of Transplantation, and written by experts within the field, Transplant Immunology provides a comprehensive overview of the topic in relation to clinical transplantation. Starting with the basic functionality of the immune system, it then moves on to cover the very latest developments in immunosuppressive drugs and protocols, as well as a look at all emerging technologies in the field. Key chapters include: * Transplant-related complications * Immune responses to transplants * Emerging issues in transplantation * Biomarkers of Allograft rejection and tolerance * T cells and the principles of immune responses In full colour throughout, over 100 outstanding diagrams support the text, all figures being fully downloadable via the book's companion website. The result is an essential tool for all those responsible for managing patients awaiting and undergoing organ transplantation, including transplant surgeons and clinicians, immunologists and researchers.

If most Americans accept the notion that the market is the most efficient means to distribute resources, why should body parts be excluded? Each year thousands of people die waiting for organ transplants. Many of these deaths could have been prevented were it not for the almost universal moral hand-wringing over the concept of selling human organs. Kidney for Sale by Owner, now with a new preface, boldly deconstructs the roadblocks that are standing in the way of restoring health to thousands of people. Author and bioethicist Mark Cherry reasserts the case that health care could be improved and lives saved by introducing a regulated transplant organs market rather than by well-meant, but misguided, prohibitions.