halfbent
RealPoor Guru
Joined: 11 Oct 2002
Posts: 2944
Location: Kentwood, Mi
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 Posted: 04/19/05 - 12:38 Post subject: World-first transplant frees diabetic
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http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,15025257%255E2702,00.html
| Quote: | World-first transplant frees diabetic
Leigh Dayton, Science writer
April 20, 2005
A YOUNG diabetic has been freed from the burden of daily insulin injections after becoming the world's first recipient of insulin-producing cells from a living donor.
The successful transplant of more than 400,000 so-called islet cells promises to be another option for treating people with insulin-dependent, or Type 1, diabetes, researchers claimed yesterday.
The procedure was conducted in Kyoto, Japan, by a team led by Shinichi Matsumoto, of the Kyoto University Hospital Transplantation Unit, and James Shapiro from the University of Edmonton, Canada.
The transplanted islets began producing insulin within minutes, and the 27-year-old woman has not needed injections since the operation 22 days ago.
The 57-year-old donor, her mother, is also doing well, the researchers reported yesterday in the online edition of the British journal The Lancet.
Commenting on the work, endocrinologist Bernie Tuch said: "It's great; it's encouraging."
But Professor Tuch, director of the Diabetes Transplant Unit at Sydney's Prince of Wales Hospital, cautioned that it was still too early to know how effective the procedure would be. "We're not there yet," he said.
Professor Tuch added that it was unlikely that living donor transplants would completely replace transplants from brain-dead organ donors because of the risk that donors would develop diabetes as their insulin-production ability decreased after islet donation.
To date, the only way to manage Type 1 diabetes has been to replace the function of the islets with injections or replace islets destroyed by the disease. Islets are produced by the pancreas, so whole-pancreas transplants can restore insulin function.
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Quoted for Paco too!
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