At Home with AAKP
April 2021
UPCOMING WEBINAR
REGISTER NOW!

Have you had multiple transplants or multiple blood transfusions? Have you been told that you have high antibody levels? Did you know antibodies are produced to fight off foreign tissue like a transplanted kidney? Join us to learn what it means to have a highly sensitized immune system and to learn about the latest advances that help those who are highly sensitized get transplanted.

SPEAKERS
Enrico Benedetti, MD, FACS
Transplant Surgeon
Professor and Head of Surgery
Warren H. Cole Chair in Surgery
University of Illinois Health
Divya Shankaranarayanan, MD
Transplant Nephrologist
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Division of Kidney Diseases and Hypertension, George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences
Lana Schmidt, MBA
AAKP Board of Director and
Executive Committee Member
AAKP Ambassador
Transplant Recipient
REGISTER NOW for our 3rd Annual Global Summit, Global Kidney Innovations - Expanding Patient Choices and Outcomes, a collaborative partnership event presented by the American Association of Kidney Patients and George Washington University!

Virtual Summit Event Dates: May 13-14, 2021
#GlobalKidney2021

Register by clicking the button below!
AAKP FLASH SURVEY - Living Organ Donor Protections, Disparities in Living Organ Donation and Transplantation in Communities of Color, and Investments in Kidney Research

Think Congress must protect all Insured & Uninsured organ donors?

Take this survey!
Are You O-K+? Join AAKP and kidney patients across the globe for National High Potassium Awareness Day on May 1 (5.1)!

Follow @areyouok5point1 on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for the latest updates and information!

Click here to learn more about how you can participate in National High Potassium Awareness Day.
New AAKP press release!

KIDNEY PATIENTS AND DOCS ASK CONGRESS TO EXPAND RESEARCH AND INNOVATION
Amidst COVID-19

Largest American Kidney Organizations Back Strategic Funding for NIH and KidneyX
Let our recipes and information about nutrition and cooking inspire you.  

Get ready to experience the joy of preparing and sharing kidney-friendly meals!
National High Potassium Awareness Day is on May 1 (5.1).

Watch this video of The Cooking Doc making Pepperita Pizza, a kidney-friendly recipe from the AAKP Delicious recipe series.
Albumin is a type of body protein made from the protein you eat every day. It is made by your liver and your level helps your doctor and dietitian determine your health and nutritional needs.

Albumin provides your body with the protein it needs to help build muscles, repair tissues, and fight infections. During dialysis, albumin in your blood can also help pull excess fluid that you gain between your dialysis treatments, from your tissues, into the blood, where it can be removed by the machine. Therefore, it is important that you eat protein every day to stay healthy.

How do you know what your albumin levels are, and what kind of protein should you eat every day? Click the button below to read more, provided by Pentec Health.
When an ice storm hit Texas, shutting down the water supply that so many dialysis patients depend on to live, many patients who perform hemodialysis at home never missed a treatment.

As a mom of three and grandmother to another trio, 58-year-old Angela Smith is always preparing for unexpected situations. And living with kidney failure makes proper preparation and having the right home hemodialysis machine absolutely critical. So, when the catastrophic ice storm hit Texas in March 2021, Angela was ready.

Because Angela dialyzes with a NxStage machine, she could use her emergency supply of bagged dialysate, or sterile pre-mixed solution. In fact, NxStage systems are the only home hemodialysis machines in the US with this capability. Angela already had five days’ worth of dialysate in her home, as recommended by NxStage, and her care team delivered additional supplies to ensure she was supported throughout the storm.

Click the button to read more about Angela's story and why it's important to have consistent, dependable treatment solutions that can help patients expect the unexpected.
Investigators have developed a 26-item home dialysis care experience instrument that they hope will be a resource for future research use, clinical care, and quality improvement initiatives in home dialysis.

The Home Dialysis Care Experience (Home-DCE) instrument is the first rigorously developed and content-valid English-language instrument for the assessment of the patient-reported experience of care in-home dialysis. Investigators describe the new tool in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

After it is fully evaluated and field-tested, this test could be broadly implemented. “Patient-reported outcome measures and patient-reported experience measures are important in quality assurance for patient-centered, high-quality care, and are used as outcomes in research studies,” said nephrologist Catherine Clase, MD, an associate professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

“This carefully-developed instrument will be an asset to clinicians and researchers working in-home dialysis, and to their patients.”

Click the button to read more.
A group of scientists and doctors at the University of Manitoba are developing a point-of-care screening test for chronic kidney disease (CKD). The test would be encased inside a small, credit-card-sized chip which could potentially allow a patient to screen themselves at home, eliminating the need to travel to get the test done.

Nephrologist Dr. Claudio Rigatto, who is also an associate professor of medicine at U of M and a researcher at the Chronic Disease Innovation Centre at Seven Oaks Hospital, is one of the collaborators on the project. “Unfortunately, we have this persistent screening gap,” he said. “The problem is patients have no symptoms so we need to test for the presence of early CKD and about 50 percent of patients that need testing aren’t getting it.”

Francis Lin, professor in the U of M’s department of physics and astronomy, has been working in his lab to design a prototype. The prototype they have developed has 16 tests in it; Lin said each test costs 16 cents to make. The UAL chip test may be accessible through doctor’s offices or pharmacies, but the team is exploring the option of mailing the chip directly to patients.

The company and the university hope to have this test clinically available within three years. "This is a much for effective way to deliver health-care,” said Dr. Rigatto.

Click the button to read more.
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