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Advances For Intestinal Transplants

Advances Made At Children’s Hospital Moved Intestinal Transplants Forward

Early in 2003, surgeons at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC performed their 100th intestinal transplant on an 8-year-old boy with short-gut syndrome. As these cases go, his was more tenuous than most because his health was also compromised by other serious conditions.

Within three months, however, the boy was recovering as an outpatient. And advances in immunosuppression management pioneered at Children’s Hospital have allowed him to recover without the use of steroids. Not long before, steroids were a necessary and often unpleasant part of post-transplant treatment to prevent the body from rejecting a donor organ.

His timely discharge and the fact he is able to recover without steroids is evidence of just how far intestinal transplantation has come and how significant Children’s Hospital’s role has been in advancing a procedure that only about a decade earlier had been considered prohibitive.

Read more about the advances we’ve made to move intestinal transplants forward.