Moderate calorie restriction during gestation programs offspring for lower BAT thermogenic capacity driven by thyroid and sympathetic signaling.

Background: Maternal calorie restriction during pregnancy programs offspring for later overweight and metabolic disturbances. Brown adipose tissue (BAT) is responsible for non-shivering thermogenesis and has recently emerged as a very likely target for human obesity therapy.

Objective: Here we aimed to assess whether the detrimental effects of undernutrition during gestation could be related to impaired thermogenic capacity in BAT and to investigate the potential mechanisms involved.

Successful liver and kidney transplantation from cadaveric donors with left-sided bacterial endocarditis.

Bacterial infections are frequent in cadaveric organ donors and can be transmitted to the transplantation recipient, which could have devastating consequences for the recipients if adequate preventive measures are not adopted. From the 355 consecutive brain dead cadaveric organ donors procured at our center in the last four years, 2000-2003, four of them (1.1%) had bacterial endocarditis as cause of death.

The process of adult living liver donation.

Objective: To evaluate both the opinion that living liver donors have of the process and the psychological, economic, and social consequences of donation.

Material And Methods: Six months after the donation, an anonymous survey was sent to 22 donors of the right liver lobe between March 2000 and December 2002.

Results: 15 surveys were returned with all of the questions answered.

Persistence of intracranial diastolic flow in transcranial Doppler sonography exploration of patients in brain death.

Objective: The persistence of cerebral blood flow (CBF) in patients with whole brain death (BD) diagnosis is an unusual phenomenon. We describe patients with whole BD diagnosed despite persistence of intracranial blood flow on transcranial Doppler sonography (TDS).

Materials And Methods: From January 2001 to December 2002, we reviewed the records of 11 patients.

Evaluation of transplant procurement management courses: an educational project as a tool for the optimization of transplant coordination.

The process of obtaining organs and tissues includes a series of procedures and skills that are fundamental to obtain a large number and high quality of transplants. Health professionals involved in transplant coordination require robest and comprehensive training to integrate the donation-transplantation process within the clinical health care field. Based on a learning-through-experience model, Transplant Procurement Management (TPM) designed various courses adapted to local educational need to train transplant coordinators, to increase active donor detection, and to promote a positive attitude towards donation; namely, Advanced, Introductory and New Life Cycle courses respectively.

Functions, responsibilities, dedication, payment, organization, and profile of the hospital transplant coordination in Spain in 2002.

In Spain, the number of donors per million of population and the activity of transplantation is a direct consequence of the continued work of the hospital transplant coordinators. There are 146 procurement hospitals with approximately 534 transplant coordinators (13.6 coordinators per hospital and 12.

The living kidney donation process: the donor perspective.

Objective: To evaluate the living kidney donation (LKD) process using donors' opinions on the impact on social, emotional, and financial aspects affecting donor quality of life.

Materials And Methods: From May 2000 to December 2002, we studied 22 donors of living kidneys at the Hospital Clinic, Barcelona, Spain, who completed an anonymous survey 6 months after donation.

Results: Most donors (86%) had themselves informed the recipient about their wish to donate, the other 14% were asked by family members.

Short- and long-term success of organs transplanted from acute methanol poisoned donors.

Background: The shortage of organs for transplantation has made it necessary to extend the criteria for the selection of donors, among others including those patients who die because of toxic substances such as methanol. Methanol is a toxic which is distributed through all the systems and viscera of the organism and tends to cause a severe metabolic acidosis. It can specifically cause serious or irreversible lesions of the central nervous system (CNS) and retina, and ultimately brain death.

Hepatic xanthine levels as viability predictor of livers procured from non-heart-beating donor pigs.

Background: The aim of the present study was to evaluate hepatic content of adenine nucleotides and their degradation products in non-heart-beating donor (NHBD) pigs and its relationship with recipient survival.

Methods: Thirty animals were transplanted with an allograft from NHBDs. After warm ischemia (WI) time (20, 30, or 40 min), cardiopulmonary bypass and normothermic recirculation (NR) were run for 30 min.

Normothermic recirculation reduces primary graft dysfunction of kidneys obtained from non-heart-beating donors.

Our aim was to analyze the short- and long-term function of kidneys procured from non- heartbeating donors (NHBD) by means of three techniques: in situ perfusion (ISP), total body cooling (TBC) and normothermic recirculation (NR). Fifty-seven potential NHBD were included. Mean warm ischemia time was 68.

Cardiovascular tissue banking in the non-cadaveric setting: ten-year experience of a university hospital-based bank with active organ donation program.

Background And Aim Of The Study: Today, transplantation of cardiovascular tissues is common practice, and tissue banking has become routine. Consequently, many institutions exist which carry out high-quality tissue banking.

Methods: The Hospital Clinico of the University of Barcelona established its cardiovascular tissue bank in 1989.

Expanded liver donor age over 60 years for hepatic transplantation.

With a growing discrepancy between the number of liver candidates and donors, traditional donor selection criteria have been greatly changed to meet the need for donor livers. Older donors are a readily available source of livers that can significantly augment the donor pool. Our series demonstrated that the course and the outcome of orthotopic liver transplantation were not influenced by donor age, as indicated by the absence of significant differences in the incidence of primary nonfunction, arterial and biliary complications, postoperative function tests, and graft and patient survival.