Zacharias Duus Holm
When a patient receives a liver transplant, there is often damage to the kidneys during surgery. Body temperature plays a role – but how? Zacharias Duus Holm will be spending the next ten months investigating this at the University of California, San Francisco, funded by the Lundbeck Foundation.
Can hypothermia during liver transplantation protect the kidneys?
Zacharias is one of the five medical students who have been accepted into this year’s DARE (Danish American Research Exchange) programme, and this is the reason why he is flying over the Atlantic to conduct research with some of the world’s most eminent scientists. He will observe liver transplants as part of his research, and when he arrives in California his project will be based on an extensive database containing details of liver transplant patients.
Only 40-50 liver transplants are performed in Denmark each year, compared to 8,000 in the USA. Kidney damage is a common complication of liver transplants, and we do not yet have a drug to prevent this problem. Mild hypothermia – cooling the body slightly during surgery – may have an effect, and this is what Zacharias will be studying more closely.
Zacharias is normally a medical student at the University of Copenhagen.