The dawn of the New Year has brought with it a new lease of life for Organ transplant patients who have liver failure. For these patients the uphill struggle doesn’t stop with finding a matching donor. In fact it would have just started.
Research has shown that despite all high tech matching done for liver transplant patients, organ rejection is still a common phenomenon. Transplant surgeon Ignazio Marino, M.D., of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, says that rejection happens in at least 40 percent of patients undergoing a liver transplant. A new medical breakthrough has shown that the combination of certain drugs has been able to reduce the chances of rejection among liver transplant.Dr. Marino and a team of researchers studied the effect of two anti-rejection drugs, Basiliximab and Tacrolimus. The medications were given to 50 liver transplant patients over a course of time.
"These two drugs, used in combination, allowed us to have a significant decrease in the rejection," Dr. Marino announced. "We went from about 40 percent rejection to only 12 percent."
Dr. Marino says this treatment is a sign of good things to come. "A transplant is not any longer a treatment to save a life momentarily. It is a treatment to give an excellent quality of life back to our patients."
Both drugs have been FDA approved and have minimal side affects.
