Wife donates Kidney to Husband!

 Well, this man certainly made the right choice when he proposed to his partner 25 years ago!

Donna Creed gave her kidney to her husband Darren who was suffering from polycystic kidney disease. When his medical problems got worse over the 12 years since being diagnosed, he was advised to look for a donor and started with family members. But amazingly, it was his wife who turned out to be a match. Doctors told them it was a one in 22 million chance that they were a match!!!

What an amazing gift she gave him. Love does help a bit when deciding should you be a living donor or hope for the more common donation from a generous person who has sadly died.

You can read more about this story on the BBC News website. The couple are planning a charity event in September to raise money for the PKD (Polycystic Kidney Disease) charity.

Footballer player's fund donates £250,000 to Kidney Charity

 While on holiday, famous England footballer Andy Cole was infected with a virus that attacked his kidneys. In 2015 this superb athlete suffered kidney failure and his life was at risk. In 2017 he received a transplant kidney from his nephew. This set of life-changing events inspired him to set up a fund and to donate £250,000 to charity to further research into kidney disease and associated problems, including mental health issues.

You can read about his story here at Kidney Research UK and also in the Manchester News .

The story highlights how even a super fit athlete can have major problems - similar to what happened to Jonah Lomu who's story is also featured in this blog and here as well. 

Older patients found to do better with long dialysis sesions

At first glance most people would say they would prefer short dialysis treatment sessions. But a recent research paper says that for older people, a longer session increases how long they will survive with the disease.

This was a retrospective cohort study of people who first commenced thrice-weekly haemodialysis aged ≥65 years, reported to the Australia and New Zealand Dialysis and Transplant (ANZDATA) Registry from 2005 to 2015, included from 90 days after dialysis start. The primary outcome was all-cause mortality. Cox regression analysis was performed with haemodialysis session duration the exposure of interest.

They found that longer dialysis hours per session was associated with a decreased risk of death - and for people over the age of 65, that is a good result.

You can read the abstract online here https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36401820/   There are some mathematical statements about how the study was assessed, but the important thing is the work says longer individual sessions are better for older patients.

NICE Recommends three treatments for Covid-19

A direct quote from the source article

People at highest risk of developing severe disease include those who are immunosuppressed (for example, as a result of chemotherapy or having had an organ transplant), or who have other conditions such as heart disease, respiratory disease, diabetes, or neurological conditions.

The draft guidance means  they will have access to treatments taken either at home or in hospital. It recommends 3 medicines as options for treating COVID-19 in adults:

Paxlovid (also called nirmatrelvir plus ritonavir and made by Pfizer);

Xevudy (also called sotrovimab and made by GlaxoSmithKline); and

RoActemra (also called tocilizumab and made by Roche).

As people with kidney problems looking for a transplant may have a reduced immunity and are therefore more likely to catch COVID-19, it's nice to know that NICE is looking into safer treatments.

Covid-19 and Kidney Damage

 In a worrying report, research shows that Covid-19 can lead to kidney damage. 

Covid-19 has been studied a great deal during the pandemic and researchers are finding evidence that it cause a whole host of problems, including acute renal failure. Research reported here gives you the technical details - for those with the deep medical knowledge, angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) has been implicated in the pathogenesis of chronic kidney disease (CKD) and is a membrane receptor for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus responsible for coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

As with al things Covid-19, the more research done and the longer the period over which it is investigated, the more knowledge will be available. This article summarises some of the things found so far.

Some worrying things to consider are that it looks like 81% of patients in intensive care with Covid-19 developed Acute Kideny Injury, with the virus more likely to target the kidneys than other parts of the body. And age seems to be a factor as well, with those over 60 being twice as likely to have problems as those under 60. In fact many of the factors that affect the severity of Covid-19 are similar in those who get Acute Kidney Injury.