Organ Transplants

A Friday funeral was set for the Northridge teenager who died last week after her insurer refused to pay for a liver transplant and then reconsidered. Meanwhile, the girl's health plan stood by its initial decision Monday.

The world's first face transplant recipient is using her new lips to take up smoking again, which her doctors said could interfere with her healing and raise the risk of tissue rejection. The French woman's surgeons made their first scientific presentation on the partial face transplant, performed Nov. 27, at a medical conference in Tucson. The 38-year-old woman suffered tissue rejection last month but is now doing well, her doctors said.

She steered with one knee, reached into the back seat and stroked the tears from her little boy's cheek. Drivers honked and shouted behind their rolled-up windows. One gave her the single-finger salute. She hardly noticed. She had something more important to worry about: saving her babies. "Please, Nate," she begged. "Hey, baby. Hey, baby Nate. Please don't cry. Just hold on. Please, baby. Nate, please." It was a bright morning in November.

The transplant program at UCI Medical Center turned down kidneys offered for its patients at an exceptional rate over the last five years, even as 150 people at a time awaited potentially life-saving organs there, a Times review has found. Many of the patients on UCI's waiting list would have had a far greater chance of receiving a transplant had they gone to other hospitals, data show.

UCI Medical Center has pledged to scrutinize every kidney turned down for patients on its transplant waiting list, following criticism that the hospital rejected an inordinate number of organs that might have saved some patients. The UC Irvine hospital in Orange will provide a written explanation for every organ refusal, and those decisions will be reviewed by top officials, including the university chancellor, according to a formal response to government inspectors released Friday.

Kidneys from elderly donors can be just as effective in transplants as younger ones, a new study has found, raising the prospect of more kidneys available each year for the thousands of people who need them. About 60,000 people in the United States are on a waiting list for a transplant, but only 16,000 per year will receive one.

UC San Diego Medical Center has removed the director of its abdominal transplant program, saying he helped mislead regulators about problems that forced the closure of the liver transplant program at UCI Medical Center, a sister institution 90 miles away. The move widens the fallout from a transplant scandal at UCI, where the medical center's chief executive resigned this week under pressure. The San Diego hospital said in a written statement that Dr.

The Frenchwoman who received the world's first partial face transplant showed off her new features Monday, and her scar: a faint, circular line of buckled skin around her nose, lips and chin. Isabelle Dinoire, a 38-year-old mother of two, spoke with a heavy slur and had trouble moving her lips at her first news conference since the November surgery to replace features lost in a dog attack. But she said she looked forward to resuming a normal life.

A review commissioned by the University of California confirmed allegations that officials at UCI Medical Center had misled regulators about the hospital's now-shuttered liver transplant program, according to a document released Tuesday. The university released a 1 1/2-page summary of the findings, but would not release the report, citing attorney-client privilege. The investigation was conducted by Los Angeles attorney James T. Duff, a former federal prosecutor.

UCI Medical Center is facing sanctions from the organization that manages the nation's organ transplant system, including one that could force the hospital to close its kidney transplant unit, according to people familiar with the matter. Medical center executives flew to Chicago last week to meet with a subcommittee of the United Network for Organ Sharing.