A heart transplant is a procedure in which a damaged or diseased heart is replaced with a healthy one, usually in patients with advanced heart failure that prevents blood from being effectively pumped throughout the body. Common conditions that can lead to advanced heart failure and heart transplantation include coronary heart disease, damaged heart valves […]

Lung transplantation is a procedure for end-stage lung disease to replace a diseased organ with a healthier one from a deceased organ donor. It is an option used to improve the health and prolong survival of patients. Lung transplant can benefit patients with diseases such as cystic fibrosis, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), idiopathic pulmonary […]

Carol Glover retired in 2017 after working 32 years for University of Alabama Athletics, and she was looking forward to her upcoming wedding and traveling the world with her new husband. Glover couldn’t have foreseen that her journey would lead to her becoming the oldest kidney-pancreas transplant patient at the UAB Comprehensive Transplant Institute (CTI).

“I started taking cough drops for a minor sore throat,” he says. “Then one day, when I was doing rounds before my shift, I became weak and had shortness of breath.”

Many young adults create TikTok videos, but Jessica Hernandez may be the only 20-year-old who has used the social media platform to document her heart-lung transplant journey.

UAB Medicine clinicians take pride in the excellent care they provide for patients and families. In 2020, employees Kacy and Daniel Tucker got an up-close view of that care – this time from the patient side. An organ transplant surgery and the premature birth of their child at the same time are not what the Tuckers would have planned, but the family now reports good outcomes for both experiences.

On September 30, 2021, a University of Alabama at Birmingham medical team transplanted two pig kidneys into a brain-dead human recipient, a major step toward future pig-kidney transplants to people with kidney failure.

Surgeons with the University of Alabama at Birmingham Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine reached an institutional milestone in February, surpassing 16,000 total organ transplants performed since its first almost 54 years ago.

This week is National Infertility Awareness Week, and UAB Medicine is home to a program bringing new hope to those struggling with infertility: the Uterus Transplant Program.

Arnold G. Diethelm, former chair of the Department of Surgery and a leader in transplantation surgery at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, died Jan. 28, 2021. Diethelm was a native of Baltimore, Maryland. His career at UAB began in 1967 when he joined the UAB Department of Surgery, upon the completion of his two-year fellowship at Harvard, at the invitation of John W. Kirklin.

It is rare that the two largest transplantation societies choose two leaders from the same institution. But this year, University of Alabama at Birmingham nephrologist Vineeta Kumar, M.D., and transplant surgeon Jayme Locke, M.D., MPH, have been named councilors at-large for the American Society of Transplantation and the American Society of Transplant Surgeons, respectively.

“A kidney transplant…is extraordinarily powerful,” said Jayme Locke, M.D., MPH, director of the UAB Comprehensive Transplant Institute (CTI), in a recent episode of ‘The Checkup’ podcast. “So is a liver, a heart, a lung—they all change people's lives. They all give life back.”