The usual treatment for diabetes is to take insulin to replace what the pancreas is not producing. Careful monitoring of blood sugar levels to achieve the correct insulin dosage may prevent or slow many diabetic complications.
Another treatment to restore insulin production is a pancreas transplant. Transplants, however, aren't recommended if patients can manage the disease through diet, medication or other means because the procedure has all the risks and recovery issues of major surgery as well as the risk of organ rejection.
To prevent rejection, patients must take powerful anti-rejection medications for the rest of their lives. These medications have many side effects and makes patients more susceptible to other illnesses.
Because there's a shortage of donor pancreases, patients must wait for an available organ. These wait periods vary depending on blood type. In general, pancreas and kidney-pancreas wait times are shorter than the wait times for a kidney alone.
One of the most serious complications of type 1 diabetes is end-stage renal disease (ESRD) or end-stage kidney disease, which may require a kidney transplant. A kidney transplant without a pancreas transplant means you must take antirejection medication for the kidney and continue to take insulin.
The possibility of diabetes damaging the new kidney and other organs also remains. Successful combined kidney-pancreas transplants prevent diabetic damage in newly transplanted kidneys as well as eliminate the need for insulin therapy. In the best case scenario, a patient would receive a new kidney and pancreas from the same donor.
By the time diabetes causes end-stage kidney failure, other complications of the disease often occur. Improvements in surgical techniques and immunosuppressive medications make it possible to perform solitary pancreas transplants for diabetic patients who don't yet have serious kidney disease but who have problems maintaining normal blood sugar and insulin levels.
With these improvements, solitary pancreas transplants are achieving the same excellent results of simultaneous kidney-pancreas transplants.
Advances in the prevention of organ rejection also make it possible to perform solitary pancreas transplants in patients who have had successful kidney transplants.
Kidneys and pancreases may be provided by a cadaveric donor, or a person who is brain dead. Kidneys also may be provided by a living donor who donates one of his or her kidneys and survives on the remaining kidney.
We encourage candidates to accept kidney transplants from living donors if a donor is available. A pancreas transplant may follow the kidney transplant six months to a year later if a pancreas becomes available.
While live kidney donors don't have to be blood relatives, they must have a compatible blood type. Donors may be excluded for high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes or history of cancer.
Clusters of cells, called the islets of Langerhans, are spread throughout the pancreas. Islets are made up of two types of cells — the alpha cells, which make glucagon, a hormone that raises the level of glucose or sugar in the blood and the beta cells, which make insulin.
In a minimally invasive procedure, insulin-producing beta cells are isolated from a donor pancreas, then injected through the skin into the portal vein of the liver, where they attach to new blood vessels and release insulin. For an average-size person, a typical islet transplant requires about one million islets, equal to two donor organs.
The beta cells migrate to the sinusoids of the liver, where they resume normal function. Previous attempts at islet cell transplants, including several at UCSF Medical Center, were hampered by the toxic effects of immunosuppressive drugs on the islet cells and by graft rejection. Less toxic immunosuppressive medications available now have improved the effectiveness of pancreatic islet transplants in several trials.
Based on these successes, UCSF began a clinical trial or study of pancreatic islet transplantation in 2001. Currently, the UCSF Islet and Cellular Transplantation Center offers two islet cell transplant procedures.
Reviewed by health care specialists at UCSF Medical Center.