Not using steroids to combat organ rejection in young transplant patients results in healthier, taller children, according to results of a treatment protocol pioneered at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford.
"We are seeing children grow as they are meant to grow," Minnie Sarwell, a Packard Hospital pediatric kidney specialist who developed the new treatment in 1998. "Not only that, their organs are performing better and are less likely to be rejected."
The older treatment used steriods to combat rejection of the transplanted organ by the body. The new treatment uses a medication called daclizumab.
The findings, collected over eight years, were presented today (Monday) at the annual meeting of the American Transplant Congress in Toronto.
The results may lead to a new standard of care for pediatric transplant patients, hospital officials said.
Omitting steroids avoids problems of "growth suppression, high blood pressure and rapid weight gain" associated with long-term steroid use, officials said.
Use of steroids stunts growth of children, cutting as much as 12 inches off what would have been their eventual adult height. But many of the children in the study caught up and surpassed their peers in height.
Sarwell and Li Li, senior biostatistician in Sarwell's lab, compared 123 children with kidney transplants who did not receive steroids with 111 age-matched children who received the standard steroid-based treatment.
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