Presse Med
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The shortage of organs for transplantation has led health professionals to look for alternative sources of donors. One of the avenues concerns donors who have died after circulatory arrest. This is a special situation because the organs from these donors are exposed to warm ischaemia-reperfusion lesions that are unavoidable during the journey of the organs from the donor to the moment of transplantation in the recipient. ⋯ New molecules are being investigated for their potential role in protecting these organs and an analysis of potential prospects will be proposed. Finally, the important perspectives that seem to be favored will be discussed in order to reposition the use of deceased donors after circulatory arrest. The use of these organs has become a routine procedure and improving their quality and providing the means for their evaluation is absolutely inevitable.
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The COVID-19 pandemic affects the transplant recipients since March 2020. Transplant centers quickly organized themselves to optimize the management of the immunocompromised patients and to progress in the knowledge of this new disease. To this end, a French Registry was created, which includes all solid organ transplant patients who have developed a SARS Cov2 infection. ⋯ The 60 days-mortality of transplant patients hospitalized for COVID-19 was evaluated at 23% and renal failure plays a major role in the poor prognosis in addition to the classical risk factors described in the general population. The advent of vaccination has been a great relief but transplanted patients have shown a poor vaccine response keeping them at risk of severe disease even after an adapted vaccination scheme. Specific strategies was proposed in this particularly fragile population like increasing vaccine doses or using anti SARS Cov-2 monoclonal antibodies.
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Lung transplantation has been accepted as a viable treatment for end-stage respiratory failure. While regression models continue to be a standard approach for attempting to predict patients' outcomes after lung transplantation, more sophisticated supervised machine learning (ML) techniques are being developed and show encouraging results. Transplant clinicians could utilize ML as a decision-support tool in a variety of situations (e.g. waiting list mortality, donor selection, immunosuppression, rejection prediction). Although for some topics ML is at an advanced stage of research (i.e. imaging and pathology) there are certain topics in lung transplantation that needs to be aware of the benefits it could provide.
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Tuberculosis (TB), known as the White Plague' is of great significance to humanity for the magnitude of morbidity and mortality it has generated over centuries from the very start of human civilization. In this Review, we will describe the history of prevention (vaccination and management of TB infection), diagnosis, treatment and pulmonary rehabilitation of post-treatment sequelae. The article leads the reader through the main discoveries which paved the way to the modern approach to TB prevention and care. ⋯ Pivotal was in 1882 the discovery by Robert Koch of the aetiological agent of TB, and his pioneering work in culturing the bacillus and developing tuberculin. Also of enormous importance was, in 1895, the discovery of the X-rays by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, discovery which paved the way to the development of the modern imaging technologies. To complement this, the more recent history of rehabilitation of post-treatment sequelae is summarized, given the importance this issue has on patients' wellbeing and Quality of Life.