Post Transplant and Covid

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:03 — 1.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Anchor lead: How risky is Covid-19 for transplant recipients? Elizabeth Tracey reports

People who’ve gotten organ transplants experienced more severe Covid-19 disease than many others at the beginning of the pandemic, but Dorry Segev, a transplant surgeon at Johns Hopkins, says the picture is much more optimistic today.

Segev: So far what we know is that if we treat properly we can lower the mortality risk in transplant patients down to what would be equivalent in an immunocompetent patient. At the beginning of the pandemic mortality rates in transplant patients were near forty to fifty percent. This was very very scary for transplant patients. But we’ve learned a lot. One of the things we know is that the medications that transplant patients are on to prevent rejection, also seem to prevent the immuno-inflammatory response of Covid.  :32

Segev’s recent study shows that vaccine response among transplant recipients is blunted, so he’s advocating for a third dose. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.