Deceased Donor Kidney Transplantation From Donors With Acute Kidney Injury: Realities and Costs.

OBJECTIVES: Transplant of kidneys from donors with acute kidney injury has shown favorable outcomes. We investigated the outcomes of kidney transplant recipients with deceased donors who developed acute kidney injury before organ procurement. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We retrospectively reviewed the medical records of recipients from January 2016 to December 2021 in a single center. Outcomes in recipients of kidney grafts from donors with and without acute kidney injury were compared. RESULTS: The mean follow-up time was 40 months. Our study included 129 (34%) kidneys transplanted from donors with acute kidney injury and 251 (66%) kidneys from donors without acute kidney injury. Delayed graft function rate in recipients was 33% in the acute kidney injury group and 25.5% in the group without acute kidney injury (P = .099). Readmission rate at 30 days was significantly higher among recipients of kidneys with acute kidney injury compared with recipients of kidneys without acute kidney injury (45% vs 33.5%; P = .02). The mean overall costs of transplant in the acute kidney injury group were comparable to the group without acute kidney injury ($253 865 vs $253 611; P = .97). The acute rejection rate was comparable between the 2 groups (4% in both groups; P = .96). Delayed graft function rate was increased with increased stage of acute kidney injury (18% stage 1, 45% stage 2, 36% stage 3; P = .03). However, the overall length of hospital stay and costs were comparable among recipients of different stages of acute kidney injury. CONCLUSIONS: Our study showed that kidney transplants from donors with acute kidney injury have early and late outcomes comparable to kidney transplants from donors without acute kidney injury. Allografts from donors with acute kidney injury can be used safely and can expand the donor pool in kidney transplant without increasing perioperative resource utilization.

Kidney Transplantation and Obesity: Are There Any Differences in Outcomes?

INTRODUCTION: Kidney transplantation (KT) is the gold standard treatment for end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients. Obesity is a strong risk factor for developing cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, and ESRD. This study aimed to investigate the outcomes of kidney transplantation in obese recipients. MATERIAL AND METHODS: We retrospectively reviewed the medical records of recipients from January 2016 to December 2021 in a single center. Outcomes in recipients of a kidney allograft with BMI ≥ 30 were compared with the outcomes in recipients with 30 < BMI. RESULTS: A total of 467 consecutive kidney transplantation recipients' files were studied. 213 (45.6%) allograft recipients had a BMI ≥ 30, and 254 (54.4%) allograft recipients had a BMI < 30. DGF rate was 29.1% in the BMI ≥ 30 and 30.7% in the BMI < 30 group (P = 0.41). On the other hand, 30 days readmission rate also did not show a significant difference between the BMI ≥ 30 and BMI < 30 allograft recipients (37 vs. 33.8%, P = 0.46). The mean overall costs of transplantation in the BMI ≥ 30 group was $254,395, and it was $256,029 in the BMI < 30 group (P = 0.84). CONCLUSION: Our study shows that the outcomes of renal allograft transplant were comparable between recipients with BMI ≥ 30 and BMI < 30 in terms of DGF, LOS, 30 days readmission, acute rejection rate, and survival rates, and BMI should not be a single independent criterion for decision making to select an optimal recipient.

Quality of life after pancreas transplantation: time to look again.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: To summarize the existing body of literature regarding quality of life after pancreas transplantation, discuss the limitations of existing studies and make an argument for the need for future investigation on this important topic using standard verifiable instruments and utility measurements. RECENT FINDINGS: Reinvigorating support for pancreas transplantation as a life-extending and quality-of-life-enhancing treatment for complicated diabetes mellitus remains a work in progress. Over the past two decades, improvements in surgical management, donor selection, recipient selection and immunosuppression have dramatically improved patient and graft outcomes, achieving durable restoration of normal glucose homeostasis in over 90% of patients. These significant advances in the field of pancreas transplantation have presumably had a positive effect on quality of life of pancreas recipients in the current era; however, this remains unconfirmed. SUMMARY: Technical success in pancreas transplantation has improved dramatically since quality of life was last vigorously investigated in pancreas transplant recipients. Comprehensive review of the literature demonstrates the need and potential usefulness of further study substantiating quality of life benefit after pancreas transplantation, as it remains one of the primary considerations for this procedure.

Araport: the Arabidopsis information portal.

The Arabidopsis Information Portal (https://www.araport.org) is a new online resource for plant biology research. It houses the Arabidopsis thaliana genome sequence and associated annotation. It was conceived as a framework that allows the research community to develop and release 'modules' that integrate, analyze and visualize Arabidopsis data that may reside at remote sites. The current implementation provides an indexed database of core genomic information. These data are made available through feature-rich web applications that provide search, data mining, and genome browser functionality, and also by bulk download and web services. Araport uses software from the InterMine and JBrowse projects to expose curated data from TAIR, GO, BAR, EBI, UniProt, PubMed and EPIC CoGe. The site also hosts 'science apps,' developed as prototypes for community modules that use dynamic web pages to present data obtained on-demand from third-party servers via RESTful web services. Designed for sustainability, the Arabidopsis Information Portal strategy exploits existing scientific computing infrastructure, adopts a practical mixture of data integration technologies and encourages collaborative enhancement of the resource by its user community.

The iPlant Collaborative: Cyberinfrastructure for Plant Biology.

The iPlant Collaborative (iPlant) is a United States National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project that aims to create an innovative, comprehensive, and foundational cyberinfrastructure in support of plant biology research (PSCIC, 2006). iPlant is developing cyberinfrastructure that uniquely enables scientists throughout the diverse fields that comprise plant biology to address Grand Challenges in new ways, to stimulate and facilitate cross-disciplinary research, to promote biology and computer science research interactions, and to train the next generation of scientists on the use of cyberinfrastructure in research and education. Meeting humanity's projected demands for agricultural and forest products and the expectation that natural ecosystems be managed sustainably will require synergies from the application of information technologies. The iPlant cyberinfrastructure design is based on an unprecedented period of research community input, and leverages developments in high-performance computing, data storage, and cyberinfrastructure for the physical sciences. iPlant is an open-source project with application programming interfaces that allow the community to extend the infrastructure to meet its needs. iPlant is sponsoring community-driven workshops addressing specific scientific questions via analysis tool integration and hypothesis testing. These workshops teach researchers how to add bioinformatics tools and/or datasets into the iPlant cyberinfrastructure enabling plant scientists to perform complex analyses on large datasets without the need to master the command-line or high-performance computational services.