MiceTimes of Asia
The most useful juice for the kidneys
Of course, if it is not contraindicated to you from other diseases.
Scientists at the University of London, found in the grapefruit a substance that can prevent the formation of cysts in the kidneys.
This substance called naringenin and is also present in other citrus fruits. It successfully blocks the formation of cysts in the kidneys, an effect which occurs when polycystic kidney disease, by regulating the PKD2 protein responsible for this.
This study was published on the eve of world kidney day, celebrated globally on 13 March and aims to raise awareness of the importance of kidneys and the risk factors for the development of kidney disease.
Discovery benefits naringenin can be a vital step forward in the future treatment and prevention of kidney disease, say the study authors.
One of them, Professor Robin Williams said: “this discovery is vital in helping us to understand how to control polycystic kidney disease.
Kidney disease are debilitating condition that can lead to death and finding an effective treatment is really urgent priority of scientists.”
PKD Fundraising
From MuskokaRegion.com, Ontario, Canada
Six swimmers taking a 30-kilometre trek from Gravenhurst Wharf to Hanna Park in Port Carling are raising funds and awareness for those living with organ issues.
Camp Kivita, a summer camp in Muskoka for children with organ difficulties/transplants, will receive 100 per cent of the funds raised.
This is the second year the swimmers, three returning swimmers and three new, are taking to the water. They are set to start at 6 a.m. Saturday, July 29, with Sunday, July 30 reserved if the weather is not co-operating. However, it is unlikely they will postpone.
“The only thing that will stop us is a thunderstorm or a gale,” said organizer and swimmer Ricky Jacobs.
Last year they raised more than $10,000 for Camp Kivita, which allowed 10 kids to attend the camp, and an Ontario award of merit for their efforts, which Jacobs’ said was very unexpected.They will be swimming relay style with each swimmer taking 30-minute legs. They anticipate finishing at Hanna Park between 3 and 6 p.m., although their arrival time at the park is a rough guess. Anyone wishing to see them off or welcome them in will be welcome.
Muskoka cottager Paul Jacobs and his battle with polycystic kidney disease was the catalyst for son Ricky to start the inaugural swim. He is on dialysis and near the top of the waiting list for a transplant.
The family has a longtime connection with and passion for Muskoka, which is why Jacobs’ says he wouldn’t hold the swim anywhere else.
In addition to his dad Ricky also swims for longtime friend Gini Buckman.
According to Ricky’s wife Livy, Buckman has Type 1 diabetes and now, at the age of 43, needs a pancreas.
Another swimmer, Wendy Chong, also has a personal connection. Her father is awaiting a heart transplant.
There are so many connections to the swimmers and the need for donors. Swimmer Nick Knezic will be doing the swim for the first time. It was New Year’s Eve when he mentioned he the idea of doing a long-distance swim. It was a perfect fit. Like the Jacobs’ family, Knezic has a connection with Muskoka as a Cache Lake cottager but he also has a link to the need for organ donor awareness. His father Dario died while on dialysis.
There is also a celebrity in their midst. They are joined by former Olympic swimmer Zsofia Balazs. Balazs was the first Canadian woman to compete in the open water 10-km swim. She placed 18th.
A pontoon boat, on loan from Walker’s Point Marina, will transport the swimmers waiting their turn in the water. There will also be a lead boat and a kayak guiding the swimmers.
A number of local businesses have stepped forward to sponsor event and they welcome more as well as people wishing to sponsor the swim for Camp Kivita.
There will be live updates via social media the day of the swim using the hashtag #organdonorswim, on facebook.com/organdonorswim, or visit kidney.ca/organdonorswim for more information.
From Bridport News, United Kingdom, by Rene Gerryts
HER husband thinks she looks like Sinead O'Connor and loves her new look, her mum just thinks she's amazing and Laura Lovelace herself is just feeling the cold.
But the former Beaminster School pupil is also feeling very grateful to everyone who's made her head shave so worthwhile as she's raised more than £1,200 for the Polycystic kidney disease (PKD) charity.
She decided to go bald for the charity as a way of both paying tribute to her mum Sue Andrews whose kidneys failed necessitating a transplant and to the charity which helped her.
Laura, who now works in Waitrose in Bridport, said: "My mum's suffered with polycystic kidney disease for as long as I can remember.
"This year in March she had a kidney transplant because the disease caused kidney failure.
"While she was going through dialysis and everything that else that happened to her during that time she was really just held our family together and remained positive.
"She was just a real inspiration to me so I just wanted to do something to give back to the charity because without that charity coming up with dialysis and supporting all the research behind and things like that my mum wouldn't be here.
"I was inspired to do the head shave by Jo Harp one of my husband's friends who raised a lot of money. I wanted to do something that raised a lot of money and mum wouldn't let me do a sky dive.
"Donations are still coming in but so far we've raised more than £1,200."
Laura's not unused to different hairstyles but grew her hair long for her wedding last year and having decided on the head shave last December kept it growing it so she could also support the Little Princess Trust by donated her 16inch ponytail.
Apart from feeling the cold Laura's quite keen on her new look and husband Sam said he loves it.
She had the shave at Snip Hair and Beauty on the St Michael's trading estate.
Mum Sue, from Broadwindsor said she offered to do the head shave too.
"But Laura said I'd been through enough. I had peritonitis a couple of times too and almost missed her wedding last year through sepsis but was thankfully discharged from hospital less than 24 hours before she got married. It has been a tough time.
"I was waiting for a transplant for more than five years which is longer than average.
"Unfortunately I went into kidney failure because your kidneys deteriorate over time."
She had the operation at Southmead Hospital in Bristol.
She can be supported at justgiving.com/fundraising/Laura-Lovelace
PKD causes numerous cysts to grow in the kidneys which can slowly replace much of the kidneys, reducing kidney function and leading to kidney failure. It is the fourth leading cause of kidney failure.
Gift of Life
At 5 a.m. on the first Friday of April, a perfectly healthy 27-year-old newlywed awoke in a hotel 300 miles from her home and walked into the nearby hospital. There, the modern-day American hero and true Wonder Woman let a team of surgeons cut open her abdomen and take out a vital organ. For the lucky recipient of her right kidney, Brittany Burton's imponderable kindness was an act of lifesaving heroism. And for all her fellow taxpayers, it was a living bequest worth as much as a million dollars.
One of us was the beneficiary of both of those gifts. Both of us badly wish that many more people in dire need could find themselves in the same happy position. And yet — largely because so many Americans don't realize the beneficence shown to them by heroines like Brittany that early spring day — many of those in need probably will die instead.
The math is pretty simple.
For those suffering kidney failure — from inherited conditions or other diseases — the only option for survival other than a transplant is dialysis. That means a laborious and time-consuming mechanical filtering of the blood — usually for many hours, three times a week — to replace the job done by the kidneys. This costs about $90,000 a year and rising. Most of that bill is covered by government insurance through Medicare.
The average five-year survival rate on dialysis is about 35 percent. Otherwise healthy people with an inherited condition such as polycystic kidney disease can fare better. People do find suitable donors after many years on dialysis, but it's not a realistic permanent solution for anyone. Those who survive lengthy periods on dialysis miss lots of work and family life and incur other costs — it's not hard to see that one dialysis patient can cost U.S. taxpayers $1 million or more.
Brittany spent months going through batteries of tests, suffering distractions during her honeymoon to avoid Zika and any other disqualifying bugs, getting holes poked in her arms, and finally undergoing major elective surgery, with no thought of getting any financial reward.
She can't truly explain her generosity. The closest she can manage is to point out a TED talk in which a Georgetown University professor tries to describe that rare breed of person who looks out at the world and doesn't see any one life — including people she has never met on the other side of the planet — as being any less valuable than her own.
For such a person, it simply seems illogical not to give up one kidney to save a fellow human traveler when science says that one remaining kidney is almost always enough to survive a full life.
One major problem for those dying of kidney disease is that not everybody thinks that way. But a second, and far more solvable problem, centers on the fact that Brittany didn't just donate for free. Instead, the government took her altruistic lifesaving donation as an opportunity to make money.
The big medical bills began arriving right after Brittany's beautiful kidney was tucked inside her recipient. Fortunately that recipient has pretty good insurance through his employer, and the out-of-pocket hospital and drug costs were pretty manageable.
The biggest expense, as it turns out, concerns the government. By law, Brittany cannot be paid a dime of compensation for the gift of her kidney. But markets in organs aside, shouldn't heroes be reimbursed for legitimate expenses? These amounted to maybe a few thousand dollars for trips by her and her husband to testing appointments around their home in North Carolina, and to the Baltimore hospital where she underwent additional tests and the transplant surgery.
Even more costly is Medicare. Although some kidney donors don't need any added coverage, some sign up for the government-run health plan — at $3,000 a year — because it is the only way to guarantee coverage in case they have complications related to the donation surgery. Brittany had her own private coverage through her job as a high-school counselor. But having submitted to a "voluntary" medical procedure, she could not expect private insurance to foot the bill in the rare event of a complication.
So the bottom line is that Brittany saved taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and in return the government's "thank you" note is a Medicare bill of $3,000 a year.
Even worse, Medicare only allows that coverage for 36 months, meaning that a hero like Brittany is on her own if she experiences some problem related to her donation after three years. It's a massive disincentive for any well-meaning person who wants to save a life and help cut government spending.
Our government's current ban on any kind of payments, other than the reimbursement of immediately obvious costs such as Brittany's airfare to Baltimore, simply goes too far. Heroes should not have to go broke as the price of their generosity.
Right now, about 100,000 Americans need a kidney. More than 4,000 Americans die every year while waiting for a transplant. There are fewer than 20,000 donor kidneys available for them each year. Transplants increase average survival rates more than tenfold.
If finding a living donor for a kidney patient can save the government tens of thousands of dollars a year, why not allow a small share of that amount to offer the altruistic some help to cover their costs of medical tests and future health insurance?
Brittany's not asking to be paid, and we aren't either. But saving lives and saving money, by encouraging more people to be like her, just seems a matter of common sense and common decency.
Paul Basken is a kidney transplant recipient and a staff writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education . Dr. Arthur Caplan is head of the Division of Bioethics at New York University School of Medicine.
Helena teen receives life-saving kidney transplant from family friend
On the second floor of a Primary Children’s hospital in Salt Lake City, doctors wheeled Ashley Lindgren, 19, into the operating room just after 1 p.m., Tuesday, June 20. She was about to get another chance at a normal life.
For the last 10 months, Ashley had undergone near daily dialysis, the exhausting process of removing her blood, filtering it, and returning it to her body.
In early August 2016, Ashley’s single functioning kidney flipped over, twisting the arteries connecting to it, cutting off the flow of blood. She was life-flighted to Salt Lake City, where she underwent emergency surgery to try and save it.
The surgery failed.
Ashley had just graduated from Capital High and was set to begin studying theatrer in Missoula at the University of Montana that fall. She was in the midst of performing in Montana Shakespeare Company’s rendition of “King Lear” when all her plans suddenly came to a halt.
“I lost all of it overnight. All of my plans for the future, all of the people I left behind in Helena, it just all fell apart.”
For 10 months, Ashley’s life revolved not around gaining her education, hanging out with friends or pursuing her passions. It was centered around early morning dialysis, a process that after three hours of filtration, left her so worn out that she slept until 3 p.m. most days. But this summer, Ashley received a glimmer of hope.
Ashley first met Ryan O’Connell at her uncle Jay’s wedding. She was only a toddler, and he was a groomsman.
Ashley had been diagnosed at 6 months old with autosomal recessive polycystic kidney disease, a disease that leads to the growth of cysts on, and eventual failure of, the kidneys.
O’Connell, a friend of the family for about 30 years, said he knew she had kidney problems as a child, but had not heard much about it in years. He came across a GoFund.mepage created for Ashley’s family last September, learned her kidney had failed, and needed a transplant.
“I had just lost my job at New West Health when they closed down. And something just told me I was in the right place in my life to do something that really made a difference. Once we got the process started, I just knew it was going to happen.”
A dancer, golfer and actress at Capital High, Ashley was an outgoing, model student.
Ashley had her first transplant at age 14. Her mother, Tammy Lindgren, was a match and successfully donated one of her kidneys to Ashley. Doctors think that because Ashley was still young at the time, space was made as she grew, and her mother’s donated kidney moved around, and ended up flipping over and failing last year.
Her father, David Lindgren, did not have the same blood type, so could not donate to Ashley. He enrolled in a crossmatch program, where he would donate to someone who he matched in exchange for receiving a donation from someone who matched with Ashley. Unfortunately, the crossmatch never materialized.
In February, O’Connell started the process of becoming a donor for Ashley. He was a match, and passed the extensive exams, questionnaires and interviews.
His family was hesitant at first. O’Connell has two teenage boys of his own, and said his family was concerned about him volunteering to go under the knife.
“They were supportive once we did the research about how safe this process is. I think they also came on board once they saw my passion for doing this.”
On June 19, O’Connell, his girlfriend and sons caravanned with his parents down to Salt Lake City. That night, the night before the transplant surgery, the O’Connells and Lindgrens picked up dinner to-go from Ashley’s favorite restaurant, Olive Garden, and headed back to the hotel to eat.
“They don’t have one in Helena, so it’s really a treat for me. Chicken fettuccine alfredo. You just can’t beat that,” he said.
Ashley said the dinner conversation wasn’t overly emotional, even though it was the culmination of so much struggle and pain.
“The word ‘surreal’ kept coming up,” O’Connell said. “Even now, just thinking we did that, you know the conversation just stops.”
On Tuesday morning, O’Connell went into Utah University Hospital, on the same campus as Primary Children’s. The surgery took less than three hours. O’Connell said he heard some voices as he slipped under the anesthesia, and woke up to his family waiting for him.
Later that night, he found out that Ashley’s surgery was a success.
By 7 p.m., Ashley said she could feel her new kidney working. After almost a year of constant tiredness, she felt alert and focused, even after a four-hour-long surgery.
“I could finally take it all in, like everything had been blurry for so long.”
The surgery left her with 19 staples and a crescent-shaped scar on the left side of her abdomen. She calls it her moon scar.
Ashley will be in and out of Salt Lake City until July 25 for follow-up tests to make sure everything is working properly. After that, she will finally pick up where she left off a year ago, and will be off to the University of Montana for a theater degree.
O’Connell said he never could have imagined the feeling of self-satisfaction he got after the surgery. He asked others to keep the Lindgrens in their thoughts while Ashley heals, and to keep an eye out for all she will be able to accomplish now.
“I’m really just a guy with an extra kidney. Ashley and the Lindgrens are the true heroes with what she has been through. I’d really like to raise the awareness of being an organ donor. Not everyone can donate a kidney or a lung or whatever, but if it is something you are able to do, there are options out there to help offset some of the costs. I would just hope everyone can find something that brings them this level of deep satisfaction that I have.”
Brittany spent months going through batteries of tests, suffering distractions during her honeymoon to avoid Zika and any other disqualifying bugs, getting holes poked in her arms, and finally undergoing major elective surgery, with no thought of getting any financial reward.
She can't truly explain her generosity. The closest she can manage is to point out a TED talk in which a Georgetown University professor tries to describe that rare breed of person who looks out at the world and doesn't see any one life — including people she has never met on the other side of the planet — as being any less valuable than her own.
For such a person, it simply seems illogical not to give up one kidney to save a fellow human traveler when science says that one remaining kidney is almost always enough to survive a full life.
One major problem for those dying of kidney disease is that not everybody thinks that way. But a second, and far more solvable problem, centers on the fact that Brittany didn't just donate for free. Instead, the government took her altruistic lifesaving donation as an opportunity to make money.
The big medical bills began arriving right after Brittany's beautiful kidney was tucked inside her recipient. Fortunately that recipient has pretty good insurance through his employer, and the out-of-pocket hospital and drug costs were pretty manageable.
The biggest expense, as it turns out, concerns the government. By law, Brittany cannot be paid a dime of compensation for the gift of her kidney. But markets in organs aside, shouldn't heroes be reimbursed for legitimate expenses? These amounted to maybe a few thousand dollars for trips by her and her husband to testing appointments around their home in North Carolina, and to the Baltimore hospital where she underwent additional tests and the transplant surgery.
Even more costly is Medicare. Although some kidney donors don't need any added coverage, some sign up for the government-run health plan — at $3,000 a year — because it is the only way to guarantee coverage in case they have complications related to the donation surgery. Brittany had her own private coverage through her job as a high-school counselor. But having submitted to a "voluntary" medical procedure, she could not expect private insurance to foot the bill in the rare event of a complication.
So the bottom line is that Brittany saved taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and in return the government's "thank you" note is a Medicare bill of $3,000 a year.
Even worse, Medicare only allows that coverage for 36 months, meaning that a hero like Brittany is on her own if she experiences some problem related to her donation after three years. It's a massive disincentive for any well-meaning person who wants to save a life and help cut government spending.
Our government's current ban on any kind of payments, other than the reimbursement of immediately obvious costs such as Brittany's airfare to Baltimore, simply goes too far. Heroes should not have to go broke as the price of their generosity.
Right now, about 100,000 Americans need a kidney. More than 4,000 Americans die every year while waiting for a transplant. There are fewer than 20,000 donor kidneys available for them each year. Transplants increase average survival rates more than tenfold.
If finding a living donor for a kidney patient can save the government tens of thousands of dollars a year, why not allow a small share of that amount to offer the altruistic some help to cover their costs of medical tests and future health insurance?
Brittany's not asking to be paid, and we aren't either. But saving lives and saving money, by encouraging more people to be like her, just seems a matter of common sense and common decency.
Paul Basken is a kidney transplant recipient and a staff writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education . Dr. Arthur Caplan is head of the Division of Bioethics at New York University School of Medicine.
From Independent Record, Helena, MT, by MATT NEUMAN
On the second floor of a Primary Children’s hospital in Salt Lake City, doctors wheeled Ashley Lindgren, 19, into the operating room just after 1 p.m., Tuesday, June 20. She was about to get another chance at a normal life.
For the last 10 months, Ashley had undergone near daily dialysis, the exhausting process of removing her blood, filtering it, and returning it to her body.
In early August 2016, Ashley’s single functioning kidney flipped over, twisting the arteries connecting to it, cutting off the flow of blood. She was life-flighted to Salt Lake City, where she underwent emergency surgery to try and save it.
The surgery failed.
Ashley had just graduated from Capital High and was set to begin studying theatrer in Missoula at the University of Montana that fall. She was in the midst of performing in Montana Shakespeare Company’s rendition of “King Lear” when all her plans suddenly came to a halt.
“I lost all of it overnight. All of my plans for the future, all of the people I left behind in Helena, it just all fell apart.”
For 10 months, Ashley’s life revolved not around gaining her education, hanging out with friends or pursuing her passions. It was centered around early morning dialysis, a process that after three hours of filtration, left her so worn out that she slept until 3 p.m. most days. But this summer, Ashley received a glimmer of hope.
Ashley first met Ryan O’Connell at her uncle Jay’s wedding. She was only a toddler, and he was a groomsman.
Ashley had been diagnosed at 6 months old with autosomal recessive polycystic kidney disease, a disease that leads to the growth of cysts on, and eventual failure of, the kidneys.
O’Connell, a friend of the family for about 30 years, said he knew she had kidney problems as a child, but had not heard much about it in years. He came across a GoFund.mepage created for Ashley’s family last September, learned her kidney had failed, and needed a transplant.
“I had just lost my job at New West Health when they closed down. And something just told me I was in the right place in my life to do something that really made a difference. Once we got the process started, I just knew it was going to happen.”
A dancer, golfer and actress at Capital High, Ashley was an outgoing, model student.
Ashley had her first transplant at age 14. Her mother, Tammy Lindgren, was a match and successfully donated one of her kidneys to Ashley. Doctors think that because Ashley was still young at the time, space was made as she grew, and her mother’s donated kidney moved around, and ended up flipping over and failing last year.
Her father, David Lindgren, did not have the same blood type, so could not donate to Ashley. He enrolled in a crossmatch program, where he would donate to someone who he matched in exchange for receiving a donation from someone who matched with Ashley. Unfortunately, the crossmatch never materialized.
In February, O’Connell started the process of becoming a donor for Ashley. He was a match, and passed the extensive exams, questionnaires and interviews.
His family was hesitant at first. O’Connell has two teenage boys of his own, and said his family was concerned about him volunteering to go under the knife.
“They were supportive once we did the research about how safe this process is. I think they also came on board once they saw my passion for doing this.”
On June 19, O’Connell, his girlfriend and sons caravanned with his parents down to Salt Lake City. That night, the night before the transplant surgery, the O’Connells and Lindgrens picked up dinner to-go from Ashley’s favorite restaurant, Olive Garden, and headed back to the hotel to eat.
“They don’t have one in Helena, so it’s really a treat for me. Chicken fettuccine alfredo. You just can’t beat that,” he said.
Ashley said the dinner conversation wasn’t overly emotional, even though it was the culmination of so much struggle and pain.
“The word ‘surreal’ kept coming up,” O’Connell said. “Even now, just thinking we did that, you know the conversation just stops.”
On Tuesday morning, O’Connell went into Utah University Hospital, on the same campus as Primary Children’s. The surgery took less than three hours. O’Connell said he heard some voices as he slipped under the anesthesia, and woke up to his family waiting for him.
Later that night, he found out that Ashley’s surgery was a success.
By 7 p.m., Ashley said she could feel her new kidney working. After almost a year of constant tiredness, she felt alert and focused, even after a four-hour-long surgery.
“I could finally take it all in, like everything had been blurry for so long.”
The surgery left her with 19 staples and a crescent-shaped scar on the left side of her abdomen. She calls it her moon scar.
Ashley will be in and out of Salt Lake City until July 25 for follow-up tests to make sure everything is working properly. After that, she will finally pick up where she left off a year ago, and will be off to the University of Montana for a theater degree.
O’Connell said he never could have imagined the feeling of self-satisfaction he got after the surgery. He asked others to keep the Lindgrens in their thoughts while Ashley heals, and to keep an eye out for all she will be able to accomplish now.
“I’m really just a guy with an extra kidney. Ashley and the Lindgrens are the true heroes with what she has been through. I’d really like to raise the awareness of being an organ donor. Not everyone can donate a kidney or a lung or whatever, but if it is something you are able to do, there are options out there to help offset some of the costs. I would just hope everyone can find something that brings them this level of deep satisfaction that I have.”
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