Canada’s hottest musical export Justin Bieber and New England Patriot all star quarterback Tom Brady made headlines last week when both issued a public plea for a person needing a life-saving organ transplant.  The unusual pairing’s public requests to their fans to join a donor registry generated headlines from coast to coast.

It began with Helene Campbell, a 20-year-old Ottawa woman in need of a lung transplant, asked her friends to help her with a twitter campaign to raise awareness about the need for organ and tissue donors.  Her ultimate goal, she said, was to reach teen singing sensation Bieber, arguably  the most famous teenager in the world, to retweet her plea for people so join donor registries.

Several days later he not only granted her wish, but tweeted her directly with these encouraging words. “@alungstory i got the word…You have amazing strength. I got u. #BeAnOrganDonor.” Bieber said to his 16.5 million followers.  Once he tweeted Campbell’s website – www.alungstory.ca, Trillium Gift of Life Network, the Canadian agency which coordinates organ and tissue donations in Ontario, began seeing a major increase in hits on their donor www.beadonor.ca website.   The agency received 1,200 registrations in one day–on a typical day they might receive 50, and averaged more than 700 a day since.

Brady’s plea was a bit more personal.  When he found out Tom Martinez, his longtime College of San Mateo (CA) coach and mentor, need a kidney transplant Brady posted  a plea to help on his Face book page on December 31.  The 68-year-old quarterback coach is now working with MatchingDonors.com to find a donor.  His currently listed online at: www.MatchingDonors.com with more than 500 other patients in need of a kidney donor.

For more information go to: For Bieber –  http://www.thestar.com/printarticle/1121719;
For Brady-  http://www.smdailyjournal.com/article_preview.php?id=227389&title=Tom%20Brady%2

Thousands more senior citizens with kidney disease are good candidates for getting a transplant and could get them if physicians would get past outdated medical biases and put them on transplant waiting lists.  Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medical Center estimate that between 1999 and 20006, roughly 9,000 adults over age 65 would have been “excellent” candidates and approximately 40,000 more older adults would have been “good” candidates for new kidneys.  None, however, were given the chance.

“Doctors routinely believe and tell older people they are not good candidates for kidney; transplant, but many of them are if they are carefully selected and if factors that really predict outcomes are fully accounted for,” said Dorry Segev, MD, PhD, transplant surgeon, an associate professor of surgery and leader of the study.  “Many older adults can enjoy excellent transplant outcomes in this day and age, and should be given consideration in this day and age.”

Segev cautioned that some older kidney disease patients are indeed poor transplant prospects, because they have other age-related health problems but he stressed that his teams new findings, in addition to other resent research, show that new kidneys can greatly improve survival even in the over 65 age group.

Those ages 65 and older make up over one-half of people with end-stage renal disease in the US, and appropriately selected patients in this age group will live longer if they get new kidneys as opposed to remaining on dialysis, he added.  The trouble is that very few older adults are even put on transplant waiting lists.  In 20007, only 10.4% of dialysis patients between 65 and74 were on waiting lists compared to 33.5%  of 18 to 44-year-old dialysis patients and 21.9% of 45 to 64-year-old dialysis patients.

For more information go to: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/se/util/display_mod.cfm?MODULE=/se-server/mod/mod

Applying the use of web-based paperless screening of potential kidney donors resulted in a flood of new applications at two US transplant centers.  Using web sites to process the information takes only a few minutes for the would be donors to confidently answer such questions such as if they have hypertension, diabetes, hepatitis or whether they are currently smokers or users of Illicit drugs.  The new screening processes are being employed at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN.

The websites differentiate between absolute ineligibility–for example, having hepatitis C, HIV, or diabetes–and relative ineligibility, such as being obese or currently smoking.  This allows potential donors  to either proceed to a longer web-based health-status questionnaire or are brought to a web page stating they are not currently suitable candidates.

“We’re having to redo some of our workflow because we’re getting so many potential donors—for example, one of the people on our transplant waiting list has 19 potential donors,” said John Roberts, MD, Chief of Transplantation at UCSF.  “It’s much more unlikely to get multiple potential donors stepping forward when the screening questionnaire is on paper.  That’s why we’re really excited about online screening.”

The Vanderbilt Kidney/Pancreas Transplant Program is having a similar experience with their online kidney donor intake form. Deonna Moore, MSN, a nurse practitioner, who was instrumental in the development and application of the web based too, said the took has been used to screen more than 600 donors in the past year.  The donor intake form can be viewed at: https://www.vanderbilthealth.com/transplant/30936

Both the UCSF and Vanderbilt programs have found that approximately 25% of people screened online are not suitable donors.

For more information go to: http://www.renalandurologynews.com/online-tools-increases-efficiency-speed-of-kidney-donor screening

A national non-profit organization working to end the “organ donor crisis” in the US, is sponsoring an online poll to see if citizens would be willing to donate a kidney, living or deceased, if they would receive $50,000 to do so.  The FAIR Foundation, a national non-profit organization working to reverse the current donor shortage said it is launching the poll to see if offering the financial incentive would increase people’s willingness to donate.

“Payment to organ donors could be in cash, mortgage loan payments to avoid foreclosure, contributions to a child’s college education, to one’s retirement funds, an IRS tax credit or payment for funeral expenses for one’s deceased loved one,” said Dr. Richard Darling, FAIR’s president and CEO, said. Darling said in a press release.  Additionally, under this policy a living donor would also be reimbursed for medical expenses, lost wages and, if the donor’s remaining kidney ever failed, the donor would be moved to the top of the waiting list.

FAIR said such a system can be funded at no cost to taxpayers.  “Medicare would pay the $50,000 and it would be a very cost-effective policy for taxpayers,” Darling predicted.  “According to the second largest provider of kidney dialysis, Davita, it costs the federal government program $50,000 more to keep a patient on dialysis than to have them transplanted.” Darling emphasized that “under the (proposed) policy of  incentivizing organ donation citizens cannot buy an organ from a neighbor or anyone except the US Government.” The organization believes if the American government incentivized organ donation with $50,000 the waiting list would be eliminated within five years.

For more information –and possibly participate in the poll—go to: http://www.prweb.com/printer/9007425.htm  The FAIR Foundation can also be accessed on Face Book.

The Gift of Life Donor Program, the organ procurement organization (OPO) serving eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware, announced it coordinated the recovery of 1,185 organs from a record 441 individuals in 2011, a national record.  In addition, the OPO said an 2,700 individuals were also tissue donors, which helped provide life-enhancing procedures for an estimated 45,000 people.

In addition, Gift of Life said there 1,235 musculoskeletal donors provided life-enhancing bone allographs for orthopedic surgeries, skin for burn patients, and heart valves to repair defects and 2,500 corneal donors to restore sight.

The OPO also pointed out it helped Donate Life America to reach its 2011 goal of registering 100 million people in the US as organ and tissue donors by registering 4 million individuals in their region.

“We thank those individuals and their loved ones for giving others the gift of a second chance at life in 2011,” said Howard Nathan, Gift of Life President/CEO.  “Moving forward in 2012, we will continue to educate our community about the critical need for more organ and tissue donors and to support families awaiting these critical transplants with programs like our new Gift of Life Family House” a 30-room  facility that provides temporary lodging and support services to family members of transplant patients in the Philadelphia region.

For more information go to: www.donors1.org