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| Science & Technology |
| 5-Way Kidney Swap Performed at Hopkins |
| 2006-11-25 |
| Costello: Well then who's on first? Abbott: Yes. Costello: I mean the fellow's name. Abbott: Who. It took 12 surgeons, six operating rooms and five donors to pull it off, but five desperate strangers simultaneously received new organs in what hospital officials Monday described as the first-ever quintuple kidney transplant. All five recipients - three men and two women - were doing fine, as were the five organ donors, all women, said Eric Vohr, a spokesman at the Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Transplant Center. The 10 participants came from Canada, Maine, Maryland, West Virginia, Florida and California. Several triple transplants have been done at Johns Hopkins, but hospital officials said the five simultaneous transplants performed last Tuesday were a first. Four of the sick patients had approached Johns Hopkins with a relative who was willing to donate a kidney but was an incompatible donor. The fifth patient had been on a waiting list for a kidney from a dead person. Together, those nine people and an "altruistic donor" - someone willing to give a kidney to anyone who needed it - had enough matched kidneys among them to pull off a complex, five-way swap. |
| Posted by:gorb |