Blogs

Festival Organs

Andy Williamson is a talented jazz saxophonist who has played at the Edinburgh Festival many times in the past.  But he also has Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD), and has a kidney transplant donated three years ago by his friend and keyboard player Maff Potts (Maff plays the (Hammond) organ).

They did a fantastic show in a smart converted church, starting at 11pm, and the only problem was that I had to do a clinic next morning. Thanks to Thursday 12th’s patients for being understanding.

Andy was puzzled that their biggest hit was ‘Toxic’ ‘ (Britney Spears) in the style of Johnny Cash, but I thought their Stormy Monday, and the Russian song on the tables, were great. You can see Andy and Maff in Holly Cocker's inspiring photos of donor/recipient pairs www.hollycocker.com/giveandletlive.html.

No holiday this summer so have caught a lot of great things at the Fringe, and because the music was so good it’s nice to find an excuse to put in another organ.

Unexpected answers.

Lowering cholesterol with drugs ('statins') prevents lots of heart disease in people who have heart disease.  Lots of dialysis patients die of heart disease.  So lowering cholesterol with statins must be a good thing for dialysis patients, right?  No, apparently not.  Two good trials now have unexpectedly shown that statins don't give the expected benefits in patients on dialysis.  

Narrowed arteries to the kidneys are a bad thing, so opening up those narrow arteries must be a good thing, just as it is for heart attacks, right?  Think again.  It is looking as if the risks are at least as bad as the benefits, at least for the first few years after the procedure.  There is a danger of doing more harm than good.

These unexpected answers show how important it is to do proper trials of new treatments.  We can't always assume that results for kidney patients will be the same as for others.  Clinical trials are really difficult to do - very time consuming, bureaucratic (it is frustrating and difficult to get permission), and very expensive.  Yet we've got to do them - we really need more to prove which are the best treatments for different kidney diseases.    

Most of these trials are too huge for Kidney Research UK to fund without help.  The UK Kidney Research Consortium is an initiative that KRUK is involved in to bring together the best ideas and get them funded.  Or if you have a million pounds spare, or one pound, you can give it online or contact Kidney Research UK directly. 

12 million people, 2 dialysis machines

I’m recently back from Malawi, a landlocked country in South East Africa which is famous for its associations with Dr Livingstone, and for its lake.  It is also extremely poor.  It has 2 dialysis machines for its population of 12 million, putting it in a similar position to the UK 50 years ago.

It is such a poor country that you may wonder whether it is worthwhile spending scarce resource on kidney disease.  On the other hand, when you see a young woman with acute renal failure after pregnancy, a condition she could make a complete recovery from if dialysed for a week or so, you want her to have dialysis.  

The experience made us reflect not only on how lucky we are to live where we do, but also on the amazing amount of medical progress there has been in the last 50 years.  This progress has been made up of thousands of tiny steps, and each time Kidney Research UK makes a grant it aims to contribute to one of them.  

We are about to hear the result of a grants round in which £1.25M will be committed to about a dozen research projects.  This is great, but it is less than a quarter of the research proposals that we received (about 1 in 5 in fact), and we wish it could be more.  

More about Malawi