UAB Synopsis, Vol. 24, No. 31, August 15, 2005
UAB transplant nephrologist and Professor of Medicine Robert Gaston, MD, has edited Living Donor Kidney Transplantation: Current Practices, Emerging Trends, and Evolving Challenges with Jonas Wadstrom, MD, a transplant surgeon from Uppsala University in Sweden. This text, featuring chapters authored by experts in the United States, Europe, and Asia, is the first devoted entirely to this increasingly important topic.
Published by Taylor & Francis (London), the book is a state-of-the-art overview of modern day practice in living kidney donor transplantation. It addresses not only traditional issues such as evaluation of potential donors and surgical techniques but also innovative and controversial areas including swaps, immunologic manipulation, and donor compensation. The first chapter, coauthored by Arnold G. Diethelm, MD, (former surgery chair and UAB transplant program founder) and Dr. Gaston, provides a history of developments that made living donor transplantation possible.
Drs. Gaston and Wadstrom emphasize the focus of the entire 15-chapter volume on the medical community's responsibility to the live kidney donor, consistent with recent guidelines developed at the Amsterdam Forum on the Live Kidney Donor (2004). As noted in the preface, authored by Boston transplant surgeon Francis Delmonico, "Perhaps future generations of physicians will understand the profound dilemma that permeates our current experience. There is an insufficient supply of organs and a demanding remedy that rationalizes potential harm to a well individual. Human live donor transplantation cannot be the ultimate solution to the ever-increasing need for organs ... (in the meantime) ... this book comprehensively records the best practices currently available." To order, visit www.crcpress.co.uk.