Kidney Paired Donation: 16 Patients, Four Hospitals, F...( DETROIT July 7 /- Henry Ford Hospital...),Health

DETROIT, July 7 /PRNewswire/ -- Henry Ford Hospital is the first in Michigan to participate in a domino donor kidney transplant in which eight patients received a new kidney from eight unrelated donors at four hospitals in four states.

Surgeries were performed on four separate days at Henry Ford, The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Integris Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City and Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis as donated kidneys were transported by airplane to their intended recipients under a Kidney Paired Donation.

It is believed to be the largest series of kidney paired donation procedures performed in the United States. All eight donors - five women and three men - and eight organ recipients - five women and three men - are either in good or fair condition.

The unique organ matching donation takes a group of incompatible donor-recipient pairs and matches them with other pairs in a similar predicament, thus increasing the pool of living-donor kidneys and enabling patients on the transplant waiting list to get transplanted sooner.

At Henry Ford, on the eve of his 14-year wedding anniversary, 57-year-old Daniel Bruce received a life-saving donor kidney June 16 from Johns Hopkins. His wife, Sally, 47, then donated a kidney June 22 to a recipient at Johns Hopkins. The couple resides in Bad Axe, Michigan, located about 120 miles north of Detroit.

A laborer with Farmer's Elevator and Grain Co. in Kinde, 9 miles north of Bad Axe, Bruce had been on thrice-weekly dialysis treatments due to kidney failure for the past year. With an outward charm and gift for giving, Bruce was a natural to play Santa Claus, which he has done for more than 30 years until the dialysis sapped his energy and forced him to curtail his route of delivering candy and peanuts to families across Michigan's Thumb Area.

Bruce hopes he can return as a full-stre
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