Psychological and Emotional Aspects in Living Donor Kidney Transplantation.

BACKGROUND: The decision to resort to living donor transplantation determines a particular condition characterized by a strong mental and emotional anguish, both for the patients and their families. The purpose of the study was to correlate the relational dynamics between donor-recipient, donor/recipient couple with the health team, and the family support perceived by the couple with the quality of life 6 months before transplant and 12 months after transplant and compare the data between the 2 time points after participating in the psychotherapy program of counseling about behavioral change. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Twenty-seven donor and recipient pairs consented to participate. The quality of life was studied through the Complete Form Health Survey (SF-36). All subjects completed a questionnaire that investigated the 3 types of fundamental relationships (donor-recipient, donor/recipient with the health team, and family support perceived by the couple). All participants were involved in an 18-month psychotherapy program in the pre- and post-transplant phase. RESULTS: The quality of the donor-recipient relationship significantly positively influences the subjective perception of psychophysical well-being before and after transplant. Post-transplant family support is crucial in ensuring a good perception of psychological and emotional health in donors and recipients. The relationship with the health team is important in ensuring a good perception of psychophysical health only in recipients after transplant. CONCLUSIONS: This study suggests that patients should be assisted by a multidisciplinary health care team and receive continuous support from relatives during the post-transplant adaptation process. This facilitates the donor and recipient postoperative quality of life.

Patterns of Personality in Living Kidney Donors.

BACKGROUND: The decision to undergo living donor transplantation determines a particular condition characterized by strong mental and emotional anguish, both for the patient and his family. Many recent studies showed the concern of living donors who, rather than being driven by altruistic reasons, meet the decision to donate with ambivalence, liabilities, and/or in response to family pressures. The aim of this study was to analyze the more frequently encountered personality variables in a sample of potential kidney living donors, together with any psychological variables that can express possible risks of an impulsive decision and/or poorly processed from a cognitive and emotional point of view. METHODS: We examined 32 potential kidney donors. The personality study was performed using The Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-III. The psychic symptoms were studied through the Symptom Checklist-90-R. The quality of life was studied through the Complete Form Health Survey (SF-36). RESULTS: The study showed that the ability to express free and therefore invalid consent, in the role of donor, is an expression of specific personality patterns, cognitive, emotional aspects and interpersonal experiences. CONCLUSIONS: The psychological-psychiatric evaluation of potential donors is fundamental to certify the state of mental health and psychological well-being, an indispensable prerequisite for the donation.

RTD fluxgate performance for application in magnetic label-based bioassay: preliminary results.

Magnetic bioassay is becoming of great interest in several application including magnetic separation, drug delivery, hyperthermia treatments, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetic labelling. The latter can be used to localize bio-entities (e.g. cancer tissues) by using magnetic markers and high sensitive detectors. To this aim SQUIDs can be adopted, however this result in a quite sophisticated and complex method involving high cost and complex set-up. In this paper, the possibility to adopt RTD fluxgate magnetometers as alternative low cost solution to perform magnetic bio-sensing is investigated. Some experimental results are shown that encourage to pursue this approach in order to obtain simple devices that can detect a certain number of magnetic particles accumulated onto a small surface such to be useful for diagnosis purposes.