Sunday, January 6, 2008

Transplanting stem cells along with a kidney

If you look far enough down the right side of my blog, you will see a section called "PKD News Search". One of the current links is to an article A quirky party in praise of the kidney. While the article is mostly pointing to the fun surrounding a pre-transplant party, the part that caught my eye was the following:

Doctors also will transplant stem cells from Flood's bone marrow into Yelk, with the hope of eliminating the need for anti-rejection drugs that can trigger negative side effects.

I've never heard of any such thing, and neither has Jeanne. If this is actually factual, this would be a pretty exciting development. Really, the whole downside of the kidney transplant is the side effects from the anti-rejection drugs. If the kidney recipient didn't need to take the anti-rejection medication, the kidney transplant would become a lot more like a cure for PKD.

If anyone has any information about this, please help enlighten me by leaving me a comment with whatever you know.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I Bob!
I'm Cristiano and I'm from Rome, Italy
I have the PKD, too and I'm trying to connect with people and families with same problem

I think your blog is nice and is very updated

Maybe I can partecipate to your next Walk with my family or you can organize it here in Italy (trip to USA is very expensive for me :-()

Ciao!
Cristiano

Sorry if my english is not so good :-(

Bob said...

Cristiano,

Thanks for the kind words.

The yearly walk for PKD does have provisions for what they call a "Virtual Walk". If there is no organized walk nearby, they encourage you to sign yourself and a few friends up as a team and then on walk day, find a nice spot near your home and take a walk of your own.

For more info, go to this page on the PKD Foundation Web Site. As the time for next year's walk draws near, I'm sure I'll be putting up more information as well.

Please feel free to keep visiting my site and be sure to check out the list of links to other PKD-related blogs on the right side of the page.

As for your English, no complaints from me. It is much better than my Italian!

Ciao!