Post Transplant Care | 3 Ways to Make Your Transplant Last
This video is about a favorite topic of mine post transplant care, and How to try to keep your kidney transplant for life, or for as long as possible and be as healthy as you can.
If you got a kidney transplant hopefully it’s functioning really well and you’re managing your post transplant care. There’s a couple additional things that you can do so make sure to check out our other videos. Our first piece of research comes from the bmc nephrology journal it was published June 17th. “Elevated parathyroid hormone one year after kidney transplantation is an independent risk factor for graft loss without hypercalcemia.”
So parathyroid hormone. It’s a hormone that regulates your calcium levels and it’s often elevated in kidney disease and sometimes your calcium can also become at a range out of balance because of advanced kidney disease so what they were looking at here is they found people with kidney transplants had an elevated parathyroid hormone so PTH. That’s what you’ll see it on the blood test and when that was elevated and even though the calcium was normal, it was a risk factor for losing your your kidney transplant.
At the end of five years they looked at people that had that elevated parathyroid hormone but normal calcium which happens in a lot of kidney transplants that have they lost their transplants, a very higher percentage had kidney failure with their transplant. So what you want to do is make sure on your blood test you’re getting that pth test. Now I can tell you I just went to my transplant nephrologist not long ago and she wasn’t concerned that my pth was a little bit elevated, but I know from lots of other research that you want to get that down especially here I‘m actually going to show her this piece of research and see what she says. But you want to get it down it’s better for you. You can get it down if you have a high pth.
Sometimes you can get it down with d3 or you might need a medication you might need a more metabolically active form of vitamin d, so first get it tested and then address it. If your doctor doesn’t think it’s important just go to another one, go to another nephrologist you’ll find one that will and give you the medications you need. So that’s one piece of research. We have another piece of research here called “prebiotic supplementation in kidney transplant recipients for preventing infections and gastrointestinal upset a randomized controlled feasibility study.” So it was a small study this is published by a publisher of medical textbooks so that’s where it’s from.
What they did with people that were getting transplants they gave them green banana resistant starch. You can find this powder online and this is a prebiotic. And what they found was by giving this prebiotic it helped reduce the infection rate that people get after transplants as well as reduce the GI side effects because you will have a lot of those after a transplant.
I’ve been dealing with them for years and the only way I got my gut much better is by taking prebiotics and by taking probiotics, so anybody with a transplant whether you got it years ago you’re, just getting it, or you’re scheduled you really want to get some prebiotics and probiotics. They just have tremendous amounts of benefit. We have lots of other videos where we discuss they are something you want for your renal transplant
The last piece of information we have here is from the journal of heart and lung transplantation volume 37 issue 9 in September 2018. It’s a little bit older piece of research but it’s important because it talks about transplants. So an intact microbiota is your gut environment, all the good bacteria having enough of them proper ratios balance so that’s the microbiota, is required for the gastrointestinal toxicity of the immunosuppressant mycophenolate mofatil.
So that’s an anti-rejection medication I take it and most people with transplants will take it it’s considered a very good anti-rejection drug but it has a lot of GI side effects so when your gut is working well you got those prebiotics those probiotics eating fiber getting supplemental fiber also that’s a prebiotic it allows the drug to be metabolized properly so the toxic part of the drug is metabolized broken down excreted properly meaning you’re not going to have side effects but if you don’t have a good gut then you’re going to have more of the toxic side effects.
The GI problems that come with the medication and I can tell you I had every GI problem under the sun after my transplant and before and the only thing that got me better where I have minimal amounts of GI problems now with the transplant prebiotics and probiotics.
