Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Symposium on Blood Transfusion, Groningen 1983, organized by the Red Cross Blood Bank Groningen-Drenthe

This supplement to Transplant International contains the Proceedings of the successful 5th Congress of the European Society for Organ Transplantation held in Maastricht from 7-10 October 1991. Of 827 abstracts submitted to the congress, 548 were selected by the Scien tific Committee for either oral or poster presentation. Of these 548 presenta tions, the guest editors selected 212 full papers for publication in this book. Two aspects are important where proceedings are concerned-the quality of the papers and the speed of publication. I thank our authors and guest editors, whose combined expertise has given us a guarantee of quality. I also thank our editorial and production teams for their tremendous efforts to hasten editing, proofreading, printing, and publication. In particular, I would like to express my gratitude to Maurits Booster, M.D., and Sylvia van Roosmalen for their assist ance and support in seeing this supplement through to completion. As a concession to time, we have waived some of our stringent rules of style and limited our correspondence with authors by, for example, page proofs being reviewed and corrected in house only. This enables us to publish two months earlier but has the disadvantage that, given the allotted time, we have not been able to ensure that each and every article has an abstract, nor that every "i" has been dotted in the reference lists or in the addresses/institute affiliations of all the authors."

As any new field in medicine develops, an the history of transplantation and the current accompanying documentation occurs in a rea status of hemodialysis as it relates to trans sonable and logical sequence. Early in the de plantation. In addition, the areas of tissue his to velopmental life of clinical transplantation, compatability typing, patient evaluation, the many research articles and case reports were transplant operation, immunosuppressive drugs, presented in the literature, and shortly there and follow-up investigations are well and clearly after, a series of textbooks were published. documented, as are the medical complications These textbooks dealt primarily with the per and the psychiatric and social problems en sonal experiences of clinicians working in the countered in kidney transplantation. major centers, who were embarking in the new Although Dr. Chatterjee draws primarily on field, as were Dr. Starzl, Dr. CaIne, Dr. Sim his own experiences, he fairly presents all the mons, and myself. This field of investigation has issues in areas in which there is controversy or now become an accepted clinical discipline, and differences of opinion. Most major university thus it is highly desirable that a manual should medical centers now have a clinical renal trans be available for the residents and house staff plantation service, and I feel that this manual who will receive training in this important area. will be an invaluable tool for their house staff In this manual, Dr. Satya N. Chatterjee pre and students alike."

Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Symposium on Blood Transfusion, Groningen 1983, organized by the Red Cross Blood Bank Groningen-Drenthe