Journey to Transplant: Developing a social support network counselling intervention to improve kidney transplantation.

Context: Kidney transplant is superior to dialysis for the treatment of end-stage kidney disease, but accessing transplant requires high patient engagement to overcome barriers. We sought to develop an educational counselling intervention for patients along with their social support networks to help patients access the waiting list.

Methods: Utilizing an Intervention Mapping approach, we established a conceptual framework to develop a behavioural intervention that can be reproduced across kidney transplant centres.

Blood Level of Glial Fibrillary Acidic Protein (GFAP) Does not Correlate With Disease Progression in a Rat Model of Familial ALS (SOD1 Transgenic).

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by specific loss of motor neurons in the spinal cord and brain stem. Currently, there are limited options for treating ALS and further investigation of the disease etiology and ALS disease progression need to be completed. There is an urgent need to identify biomarkers to detect and study disease progression in ALS.

IPF lung fibroblasts have a senescent phenotype.

The mechanisms of aging that are involved in the development of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) are still unclear. Although it has been hypothesized that the proliferation and activation of human lung fibroblasts (hLFs) are essential in IPF, no studies have assessed how this process works in an aging lung. Our goal was to elucidate if there were age-related changes on primary hLFs isolated from IPF lungs compared with age-matched controls.

Ex Vivo Lung Perfusion: Past, Present, and Future.

Lung transplant is the only therapy for several end-stage lung diseases; however, the number of donated lungs suitable for transplant is not sufficient, and hundreds of patients have died waiting for an organ. Ex vivo lung perfusion (EVLP) has emerged as a new technology with the potential of reconditioning human donor lungs previously unsuitable for transplantation. Since the first successful transplant of a lung treated using EVLP in the year 2000, multiple clinical trials have demonstrated, in several transplant centers around the word, the feasibility and the potential of EVLP to increase the total number of lungs available for transplant.