Kidney donor was her husband's MISTRESS !

I thought I was seeing things when this one caught me eye, but that's what it says here!

A Turkish woman, Meliha Avci,, has been on dialysis for 12 years has had a transplant. The donor was a woman her husband met 5 years ago, while he visited the hospital when she was having dialysis, and she became his mistress.

But it isn't just a kidney she has received - earlier she received a blood donation from the mistress as well!
Meliha Avci is quoted as saying "We have shared blood, we have shared my husband, and now we are sharing kidneys"

Meliha Avci only found out about the affair recently. It's one thing to treat an affair in a sensible, non-violent manner, but you don't expect the other woman to give you a kidney as well!

Prepare yourself of problems, especially in winter.

We thought that, given the bad weather at this time of year, a bit of emergency planning advice would be helpful. Having a plan to cope with a local flood, dangerous storms or strong winds, or heavy snow falls can be vital of dialysis patients. Last year my car was snowed in and unusable for three weeks, for example. Could you handle that?

Missed dialysis treatments can obviously cause you problems (recent research showed that those on three times a week dialysis were more likely to have a problem during the three-day gap, compared to the other two two-day gaps). Missing a dialysis session due to extreme weather will lead to excess fluid build-up, which could lead to heart failure, breathing problems and other complications.

One obvious plan is to have a decent reserve of renal friendly food in stock, in case deliveries to your local store gets disrupted or you can't get there for supplies for a few more days than normal. Restricting your fluid intake becomes even more important if there is a chance you will miss your next session - it's no use realising this on the day you can't leave your home and face a bigger gap than normal between sessions. So think and plan ahead.

Create an emergency box, with copies of the important local phone numbers, first aid kit and several days supply of any drugs you will need. In the case of drugs, don't pack a box and leave it sitting there for two years, the drugs may be out of date. A sensible idea would be to remove and use any drugs in your emergency box once a month, and replace them with some of your latest supplies, thus keeping them all within date. This is quite important for diabetics with kidney problems.

Monitor your diet a bit more closely when bad weather is threatened. You don't want to get close to a sensible limit, then have to survive snow bound for three days and go over the limit on, say, potassium intake or fluid intake.

If you are on home dialysis, how would you handle a power cut? Does your machine have a standby battery? Is it actually fully charged? In more remote areas, where a power cut can leave people very isolated, some have a standby power generator. Does it have fuel handy as well? Is your cell phone fully charged? Some people who use their mobile phone a lot have an add-on booster battery pack that will keep it charged for several days of heavy use. As you may be in greater need of reliable communications than the average yuppie, getting such a booster battery pack could be vital. The cost is trivial compared to the benefits it brings.

These sort of plans are all very obvious when you read them. But have you implemented any of these ideas? Why not start now.

Dialysis companies grilled over rising costs

The Oregon Medical Insurance Pool (OMIP) decided that, when its dialysis costs rose from $7 million to $20 million, in a mere three years, it was time to have a word with the two biggest dialysis companies and the American Kidney Fund. After all this represents inflation of around 100% per year! Not quite what the rest of the world is seeing as an inflation rate.

According to an article in Oregon Live, OMIP board members cited figures showing dialysis companies charge OMIP dialysis patients as much as 15 times what they charge Medicare. Dialysis companies said that's because they lose money on Medicare rates, which are set by federal law. But the high rates also means the program's patients can hit their $2 million OMIP coverage limit in a few years, leaving them without health insurance.

Naturally OMIP are concerned about this state of affairs, and are trying to persuade the big two, Fresenius and DaVita, to lower their rates to something comparable with the rates paid by Medicare.

KDN's Greatest Hits

As it's January, and due to the way the blog moves posts out of sight (but not site), I thought a review of our most popular posts would be in order. It will also enable you to easily look back at posts you may have missed. (Or why not deliberately look at some of the older posts from the selection in the Blog Archive list on the left?)

By far and away the most popular post is
Cost comparison of peritoneal dialysis vs hemodialysis from December 2010, with twice the number of views of the next most popular post. Clearly something people are very interested in.
Are patients getting treatment dictated by the profit margin or its suitability?

In second place we have
Vitamin E helps fight muscle cramps during dialysis, a post from November 2009. You'd expect some older posts to have generated a fair number of views, but nothing compares to the younger post above.

In third place it's
Implantable Artificial Kidney - coming soon from September 2010. An article like this can be expected to be popular of course, but we have seen similar claims dating back several years as most people would know.

The fourth most popular post is
News Release on Wearable Kidney Belt, from February 2010. The more astute readers might be noticing a trend at this point, and wondering what's coming next.

And the trend spotters would be right, because in fifth place it's
Portable Dialysis Machine, from December 2009.

Finally, as these are more established posts and you'd expect them to have generated more hits over time, what was the most popular post from 2011? You might be able to predict it...
AWAK testing a portable dialysis unit, from August 2011. and this was the ninth most popular post overall. Not bad for such a recent post.
That trend in popularity just continues, doesn't it...

The next most popular post from 2011 wasn't even in the top ten
Diet that reversed kidney failure in diabetic mice, from June 2011. Unfortunately the researchers involved admitted that it was questionable whether the diet model used would be sustainable in humans, even in the short term.

So, an annual list of seven - bet you've read so many top ten lists by now that something different is appreciated. Who will be the winners next year? At this rate the current No. 1 and 2 are likely to stay there, as for the rest - that's up to you.

Happy New Year

Genetic link indicating susceptibility to glomerulonephritis

It is well known that kidney disease affects people from some backgrounds more than others. And a recent report has now identified key genes which show a susceptibility to the kidney disease Immunoglobulin A Nephropathy (sometimes shortened IgAN). The article is currently available in the advanced on line issue of Nature Genetics, but will eventually appear in the next print edition of this respected scientific journal.

IgAN is a kidney disease where Immunoglobulin A gets deposited in the glomeruli, leading to glomerulonephritis, leading to kidney damage, and is the commonest cause of renal failure among Asian people. Up to 40% of sufferers require dialysis or transplants. The genetic trends can be spotted by the distribution of the disease - in Asian populations it can be as high as 3.7%, while amongst Caucasians it is 1.3% but among African groups it is quite rare.

A team of 25 medics and scientists from Singapore and China, working at 14 hospitals and research centers studied literally thousands of individuals of Han Chinese origins, and identified variants of genes which occurred in patients with IgAN. This research can help provide new insights on the pathways involved in the cause of the disease, and by identifying susceptible individuals provide opportunities to prevent them developing serious kidney damage.

This is not the first study to suggest there is a genetic link causing IgAN. Earlier work from 2003 by a large group of Japanese medics and scientists examined several hundred Japanese patients, and found faults in one of the genes in many cases. They suggested the approximate location of a gene which resulted in IgAN in Japanese patients.