FERNANDO COSIO: I'm Fernando Cosio. I am medical director of the kidney pancreas transplant program at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. So these are a series of, I mean, the last of a series of studies on kidney transplantation in patients with diabetes before the transplant. Diabetes has been a bane of transplantation, a bane of patients really, but the bane of transplantation for a long period of time.
Because, unfortunately, individuals that come to us with diabetes before the transplant, they have more than a double chance of dying, you know, following transplantation, double compared with patients without diabetes. So it has been very difficult to achieve great successes in patients with diabetes because of the very high mortality. And it's not that transplantation doesn't work on them. In fact, it works beautifully on them. It's just that diabetes has such profound consequences on the patient before they come to us.
The transplant, it just doesn't improves their survival compared with dialysis, but it doesn't improve it to the level of the non-diabetic. It became apparent to me that the difference in between the patients, in survival, between the patient with diabetes and the patient with diabetes was narrowing over time. So what used to be a big difference in the 90s and this study goes from '96 to, I think, 2008 or something, it was narrowing the difference.
I said, oh, that's kind of interesting and, of course, exciting. The heart disease actually has declined by almost half. You know, the heart events on the diabetic post-transplant, in the number of heart attacks, acute heart attacks, or deaths from heart disease. The infections actually declined dramatically. So in fact, the risk of infection is the same in the diabetic and the non-diabetic. So that's fantastic.
Unfortunately, the risk of cancer, which is higher than in the non-diabetic, hasn't changed. So that part hasn't changed. From the things that the patient can do, there is no doubt that the care from the diabetes point of view, that is the weight control, glucose control, the blood pressure control. You know, in following all those parameters, it really pays off. I don't care if you are 20 years old, you are 50, or you are 80, it really pays off.
