Patients with chronic pancreatitis often experience intractable pain. Patients make frequent trips to the emergency department and may have numerous hospital admissions. They also can experience significant lifestyle disruptions and a greatly diminished quality of life.
The opioid epidemic has resulted in thousands of deaths in people infected with acute hepatitis C (HCV) due to IV drug use. Because many of these people are undiagnosed, especially in high-risk populations, many organs from HCV-positive donors are still being procured. The development of highly effective direct-acting antiviral (DAA) therapy has made it possible to successfully transplant HCV-positive organs into HCV-negative recipients and treat the hepatitis C post transplant.
The Uterus Transplant Program at Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas (Baylor Dallas), part of Baylor Scott & White Health, was one of the first programs in the world to study uterus transplantation and has quickly become the largest program in the world. With 20 transplants and 14 healthy babies, the Baylor Dallas Uterus Transplant Program is now the first in the world to offer uterus transplantation outside of a clinical trial.
Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas, part of Baylor Scott & White Health, recently performed its 200th islet cell transplant in a patient with chronic pancreatitis, making Baylor Dallas one of the four largest islet cell transplant programs in the nation in terms of volume. Baylor Dallas is the only hospital in North Texas that performs these transplants.
Achalasia is a serious motility disorder of the esophagus that impacts more than 5,000 people in the US each year. Patients with achalasia experience damage to muscle and nerve cells in the esophagus, resulting in a loss of the peristaltic activity that normally pushes food through the esophagus into the stomach, and failure of the lower esophageal sphincter (LES) to relax with swallowing, which further blocks the transit of food. Thus, achalasia patients experience severe swallowing difficulty that adversely impacts their quality of life. Because the etiology of achalasia is not known, current therapies do not cure the disease and only address its symptoms. Exciting new research from Baylor Scott & White Research Institute (BSWRI) shows that LES muscle in achalasia exhibits profound mast cell degranulation, a hallmark of allergy-induced inflammation. This work adds support to the novel hypothesis developed by BSWRI researchers that achalasia might be an allergic disorder.
