The Wounded Soldier Was Saved From The Acquisition Of Diabetes Through An Emergency Transplantation Of Cells

The Wounded Soldier Was Saved From The Acquisition Of Diabetes Through An Emergency Transplantation Of Cells.
In the word go handling of its kind, a wounded enlisted man whose damaged pancreas had to be removed was able to have his own insulin-producing islet cells transplanted back into him, careful him from a life with the most severe form of type 1 diabetes. In November 2009, 21-year-old Senior Airman Tre Porfirio was serving in a small square of Afghanistan when an insurgent who had been pretending to be a soldier in the Afghan army shot him three times at devoted range with a high-velocity rifle.

After undergoing two surgeries in the field to stop the bleeding, Porfirio was transferred to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC As part company of the surgery in the field, a platter of Porfirio's stomach, the gallbladder, the duodenum, and a section of his pancreas had been removed. At Walter Reed, surgeons expected that they would be reconstructing the structures in the abdomen that had been damaged.

However, they hurriedly discovered that the uneaten portion of the pancreas was leaking pancreatic enzymes that were dissolving parts of other organs and blood vessels, according to their story in the April 22 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. "When I went into surgery with Tre, my end was to reconnect everything, but I discovered a very dire, iffy situation," said Dr Craig Shriver, Walter Reed's chief of broad surgery.

So "I knew I would now have to remove the remainder of his pancreas, but I also knew that leads to a life-threatening trim of diabetes. The pancreas makes insulin and glucagon, which take out the extremes of very gamy and very low blood sugar". Because he didn't want to leave this soldier with this life-threatening condition, Shriver consulted with his Walter Reed colleague, shift surgeon Dr Rahul Jindal.

Jindal said that Porfirio could gross a pancreas transplant from a matched donor at a later date, but that would lack lifelong use of immune-suppressing medications. Another option was a transplant using Porfirio's own islet cells - cells within the pancreas that give birth to insulin and glucagon. The procedure is known as autologous islet chamber transplantion.