An internet-based intervention to improve psychosocial outcomes in heart transplant recipients and family caregivers: development and evaluation.

Background: Although quality of life (QOL) is generally improved by heart transplantation, medical noncompliance and mental health and QOL limitations often emerge and persist. Transplant teams' ability to address these issues is hampered because many patients reside long distances from the transplant program. We therefore conducted the first empirical evaluation of an internet-based psychosocial intervention for heart recipients and their families.

Attrition of potential bone marrow donors at two key decision points leading to donation.

Background: The National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) has had remarkable success at recruiting potential bone marrow donors and recently has become increasingly focused on the retention of registered volunteers. This study extends the authors' work examining factors associated with attrition from the registry. Its goal was to determine which characteristics from six psychosocial domains were associated with attrition at two key stages leading to donation.

The association of donor center characteristics with attrition from the national marrow donor registry.

Background: The National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) has approximately 5 million registered potential donors and continues to add more than 30,000 new recruits to the registry monthly. However, more than 30% of potential donors are not available or decline to donate at key decision points in the donation process. Although previous researchers have examined the association of individual donor characteristics with attrition from the registry, no published studies have investigated the role of donor center characteristics or features of the donor centers' environment on attrition rates.

Avoidant coping with health problems is related to poorer quality of life among lung transplant candidates.

Context: Lung transplant candidates face numerous health-related stressors. Although previous work has described the range of coping strategies candidates may use, whether those strategies are related to quality of life in physical functioning, emotional, and social domains has rarely been examined.

Methods: Adult lung transplant candidates (N = 128) participated in semistructured interviews that included questions regarding global and domain-specific quality of life and a multidimensional assessment of coping with health-related problems.

Factors associated with ambivalence about bone marrow donation among newly recruited unrelated potential donors.

Background: Previous research has indicated that feelings of ambivalence about donation are associated with donors' decisions not to donate and with less positive physical and psychosocial outcomes among donors who donated despite feeling ambivalent. The current study examines the prevalence of ambivalence among newly recruited potential bone marrow donors and identifies factors associated with greater ambivalence.

Methods: Using a cross-sectional design, questionnaires were mailed to a stratified random sample of individuals newly recruited to the National Marrow Donor Program registry at 71 local donor centers.