Nonadherence occurs in a sizable minority of organ transplant patients. Among adults the highest rate of noncompliance is for following diet (ca. 25%) and taking immunosuppressant medications (ca. 23%), among children attending clinic appointments (ca. 13%) and taking immunosuppressant medications (ca. 6%). Emma K. Massey describes the background in the textbook "Organ Transplantation: Ethical, Legal and Psychosocial Aspects". Nonadherence tends to increase over time after transplantation among both adults and children.

Battles for Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant have been going on for nearly two months — Russian troops have been trying to seize this final pocket of Ukrainian resistance since mid-March. Russian President Vladimir Putin called off plans for the Russian military to storm the plant in late April, but Azovstal’s defenders regularly report renewed shelling and assaults. On May 7, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk announced that “all” civilians had been evacuated from the besieged steel plant. The next day, soldiers from the Azov regiment, which is defending Azovstal, said in a press briefing that they too needed to be evacuated, because they had used up all of the resources they had for waging an “effective defense.” On Tuesday, May 10, the Azov regiment published photos of their wounded soldiers and urged “the entire civilized world” to help with their evacuation. “The world should see the conditions in which the wounded, mutilated defenders of Mariupol are [living] and act,” the accompanying statement said. Meduza shares these photos here....

A pig virus may have contributed to the death of a man who received a groundbreaking transplant using a pig heart, according to news reports.

The man, 57-year-old David Bennett Sr., died on March 8, two months after his pig-heart transplant surgery. The heart used in the transplant was from a pig that had been genetically modified to make its heart more acceptable to a human immune system.

Cardiac surgery: Today, the greatest interest in the techniques of acid-base management lies in the psycho-neurological outcome after bypass and in the resulting quality of life of the patient. The acid-base management during hypothermia is of paramount importance for medical specialists conducting extracorporeal circulation or performing cardiopulmonary bypass. Maintenance of the internal environment/homeostasis is vital, no less important than respiration or circulation, Prof. Dr. Ervin Severdija emphasizes.

C-reactive protein (CRP) has been shown to increase dramatically during COVID-19 progression and correlates with deleterious outcomes. Selective CRP apheresis can reduce circulating CRP levels fast and effective, Fabrizio Esposito, Harald Matthes and Friedemann Schad report in Journal of Clinical Medicine.

In just 100 million years, the universe could start to shrink, new research suggests. After nearly 13.8 billion years of nonstop expansion, the universe could soon grind to a standstill, then slowly start to contract, new research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are diagnosed with cancer — and for years, the Ukrainian healthcare system has done fairly well at treating them. Since the war began, however, Ukraine’s medical centers have been overwhelmed by the war-wounded, leaving them with little capacity for cancer patients. While international organizations have mobilized to evacuate juvenile cancer patients quickly and efficiently, adults with the disease have frequently had to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, neighboring countries are worried about their own health care systems being overwhelmed by Ukrainian patients.

Yale researchers have identified a particular immune response pathway that leads to severe illness and death in people infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The study was published April 28 in the journal Nature. Researchers have known that once the COVID-19 virus infects the lungs it can trigger what has been called a “cytokine storm,” or an overactive immune response that leads to deadly inflammation in the lungs. For the new study, a Yale team led by postdoctoral fellow Esen Sefik, who is part of the lab of senior author Richard Flavell, studied the effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection in mice engineered to have a human immune system.

"Cardiovascular events are as common in peritoneal dialysis as in hemodialysis, and the percent contribution of cardiovascular death ranges from 27 to 56% for peritoneal dialysis and from 25 to 44% for hemodialysis," Branko Braam et al. report. "Despite theoretical advantages the optimistic expectations of less patient morbidity and mortality on peritonealdialysis treatment have not been realized."

Preparations for flying the first patients injured in the conflict in Ukraine to Germany for medical treatment are currently running at top speed. Patients have been selected by the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Force and have already been assigned to clinics here in the German Trauma Society’s TraumaNetwork.