Should the law on anonymity of organ donation be changed? The perception of liver transplant recipients.

Background: Belgian politicians submitted a proposal to rescind the law on anonymity of organ donation and transplantation and facilitate contact between donor families and recipients. It remains uncertain if recipients support this proposal.

Methodology: One liver transplant patient organization (n = 176/249) answered and provided comments on two questions: (i) how satisfied are you with the current principle of anonymity of the identity of the donor and (ii) the law about anonymity should be changed to allow the donor family and the patient to meet.

Machine perfusion or cold storage in deceased-donor kidney transplantation.

Background: Static cold storage is generally used to preserve kidney allografts from deceased donors. Hypothermic machine perfusion may improve outcomes after transplantation, but few sufficiently powered prospective studies have addressed this possibility.

Methods: In this international randomized, controlled trial, we randomly assigned one kidney from 336 consecutive deceased donors to machine perfusion and the other to cold storage.

An international perspective: job satisfaction among transplant nurses.

Context: The high demand for transplant nurses across the world leads us to examine job design and job satisfaction because job satisfaction is linked to better outcomes for patients.

Objective: To describe international transplant nurses' perspectives of job design and job satisfaction by using Herzberg's theory of motivation.

Methods: Descriptive, correlational design.

Implementation of an intervention plan designed to optimize donor referral in a donor hospital network.

Context: The shortage of donor organs remains the most important factor of waiting list mortality in organ transplantation worldwide. Donor detection is influenced by the legal system, family refusal, and underreporting caused by erroneous knowledge of donation criteria and lack of familiarity with the procedure.

Objective: To identify possible key factors of donor referral patterns within an existing cooperation with donor hospitals and donor units across the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, an area of approximately 3 million inhabitants.

Combined 'en bloc' liver and pancreas transplantation in patients with liver disease and type 1 diabetes mellitus.

Liver disease alters the glucose metabolism and may cause diabetes, but this condition is potentially reversible with liver transplantation (LTx). Type 1 diabetes mellitus may be coincidentally present in a LTx candidate and immunosuppressive drugs will aggravate diabetes and make its management more difficult for posttransplant. In addition, diabetes negatively influences outcome after LTx.

Tolerance of liver transplant patients to strenuous physical activity in high-altitude.

Physical functioning is improved after liver transplantation but studies comparing liver transplant recipients with normal healthy people are lacking. How liver (and other organ) transplant recipients tolerate strenuous physical activities is unknown. There are no data on the tolerance of transplant patients at high altitude.

Steroid-free immunosuppression during and after liver transplantation--a 3-yr follow-up report.

Background/aims: Steroids are traditionally used in liver transplantation as a part of a triple or quadruple immunosuppressive regimen. Steroids act non-specifically and cause multiple side-effects. Most liver transplantation centers reduce the dosage of steroids and eventually withdraw them after various time intervals.