Word: donor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Sibling Donor. One possible alternative was an intestinal transplant. Told that only six had ever been performed, and no recipient had survived longer than 26 days, the patient said she wanted to take the chance. But where to find a donor? Jane Smith has a sister, Anne, the mother of three. Told that a healthy person can live comfortably with only half the normal length of small intestine, Anne volunteered to give half of hers to her sister. Their blood-cell types proved to be an unusually close match, reducing the probability that a graft would be rejected...
...feet of small intestine (the lower jejunum and upper ileum), and used this to replace Jane's missing tract. The surgeons also left a small, separate piece of the graft protruding through the abdominal wall, to facilitate observation of the transplant's progress. Last week the courageous donor was eating normally, and she expects to go home within a few days. Recipient Jane, after setting an endurance record for long-term survival on intravenous feeding, hungrily looked forward to the first taste of real food destined for her rebuilt digestive system...
...damage to the eardrum-repair of the tympanum with tissue usually taken from the fibrous lining of the ear muscle. This operation sometimes thickened the eardrum and thus produced only questionable improvements in hearing efficiency. Now surgeons are perfecting a technique for replacing damaged eardrums and ossicles with healthy donor tissue. The operation offers some new hope for an escape from hearing impairment...
...years, doctors who tried eardrum transplants were hampered by their inability to preserve a donor's tissue until it was needed. One solution to their problem was developed by Dr. Rodney Perkins, of Palo Alto, Calif., who tried the buffered formaldehyde solution that has proved successful in the preservation of heart valves. The formaldehyde not only preserves the eardrum and helps retain its shape, but may even improve its tensile strength as well. As a result, doctors can now obtain healthy eardrums and ossicles from deceased donors and store them in an eardrum bank for up to seven months...
Although harvesting and storing eardrum tissue is no longer difficult, the transplant procedure remains delicate. Surgeons make an incision behind the recipient's ear and cut away any diseased or damaged portions of the hearing organs before replacing them with the donor tissue.,If only the donor's eardrum is used, it is fastened to the patient's ossicles with a nylon sling. If the donor's ossicles are used as well, they are connected to the patient's remaining ear bones so that sound vibrations can be conducted unimpeded to the inner...