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Talk to your family this Organ Donation Week
Our health equalities programme manager, Neerja Jain, explains why Kidney Research UK is encouraging families from all communities to talk about organ donation. This Organ Donation Week, we’re encouraging families to talk about organ donation. Whilst great strides have been made in England, Scotland and Wales with new legislation, at the end of the day,…
Family bonds made even closer through transplant
A teenager who has lived with a chronic kidney condition for 16 years has been given a second chance of life, thanks to his dad. Mark Blakemore, from Stokesley in North Yorkshire, was diagnosed with kidney disease as a toddler following an infection of Ecoli-0157. A rare case of Ecoli-0157 leading to chronic kidney disease Some…
New vice chair Ben humbled by appointment
Growing up with kidney disease, our newly appointed vice chair of trustees is in a good position to know how it feels to live with compromised health. Ben Digby, 36, was diagnosed with minimal change nephrotic syndrome at 20 months old, an auto immune condition which attacks the kidneys. After a childhood spent in and out of hospital, Ben was discharged with a clean bill of health at the age of 22, so is able to use his lived experience…
Kidney disease diagnosis blow to mums of five donation hopes
A mum of five from Cheadle in Cheshire is holding out hope for a kidney transplant after her potential donor – another mum of five – couldn’t donate her kidney when it was discovered she also had kidney disease. “I was heartbroken and felt like I had let Paula down, despite my own diagnosis,” said Kirsty Vaughan, 47, a business…
Finding hope for patients with high antibodies in need of a kidney transplant
To mark Organ Donation Week, we have caught up with one of our researchers, Dr Siân Griffin, a consultant nephrologist in Cardiff, to find out how she is striving to improve the transplant options for patients with very high antibody levels. Certain antibodies can complicate kidney transplantation Antigens are molecules that can trigger an immune response. When our immune systems encounter antigens on foreign cells like bacteria and viruses, they produce…
The inside track on the work to protect kidney patients from Covid
Miranda Scanlon writes I’ve been the lead of the Kidney Research UK Lay Advisory Group since April this year, but I’ve been a kidney transplant patient for much longer – 15 years in fact! Like so many other transplant patients I was shielding for much of the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, as the risks of serious consequences for immunosuppressed people who caught Covid have been very high. The NHS Covid-19 vaccination programme…
Tool to help GPs predict which kidney patients need hospital care added to NICE chronic kidney disease guideline
We are delighted to share that a study we funded that discovered a way to help GPs predict which patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) are more likely to need dialysis or a kidney transplant in the future has directly led to changes in the NICE CKD guidelines, which were updated last week. Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash A tool…
Iron treatment decreases risk of heart failure in patients on haemodialysis
New analysis from a pioneering clinical trial that we coordinated to tackle anaemia in patients on dialysis show that high doses of intravenous iron can also improve outcomes for patients who have recently started haemodialysis and develop heart failure. The PIVOTAL trial Anaemia and iron deficiency are common side effects of haemodialysis and these conditions…
JCVI recommends kidney transplant patients receive third Covid-19 vaccine dose
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has issued new advice that people with severely weakened immune systems should have a third Covid-19 vaccine dose. Research studies, including one we have supported, have shown that people who are severely immunocompromised are not as well protected by Covid-19 vaccines as the wider population. It is…
Ethnicity adjustment for kidney function testing removed from NICE chronic kidney disease guideline
The National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) chronic kidney disease (CKD) guideline update, released today, has removed the recommendation to adjust for Black ethnicity when estimating how well a patient’s kidneys are working; a change that will prevent overestimation of kidney function in people from Black ethnic groups and enable early treatment for chronic…