Organ Shortage: The Solutions is the latest subject in the Continuing Education series, organized by Fondation Marcel Merieux and Universite Claude Bernard in Lyon.
The annual subject is chosen to reflect the status of the topical issues of the year, as taught by leading international experts. The contribution of transplantation and clinical immunology to advanced medicine is considerable and promising. The annual volumes in this series keep the reader abreast of these developments.
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Over the last few years, transplantation knowledge and techniques, as well as insights into pharmacology, have improved, thus enabling greater access to transplantation for patients.
The pool of organs for transplantation is stable, and therefore insufficient to cope with the growing demand. To adjust demand and resources in the most equitable way, organ procurement and allocation have been organized nationally and often across borders. The national and international organ exchange programs were studied and discussed during the Congress on Organ Allocation, from which this book is...

In all varieties of organ transplants, early results have dramatically improved over the past two decades and failures due to acute rejection are becoming rarer. Efficient immunosuppressive regimens have been developed with the objective of very good results at 1, 3 and 5 years.
Successful transplants, however, are significantly less frequent at 10 and 20 years, and many patients require retransplantation. Many factors are involved in late graft loss and it is now well recognized that, in addition to chronic rejection, a number of non-immunologic factors play a prominent role. In the...