The Taipei Veterans General Hospital yesterday touted the efficacy of liver transplants for people with metabolic liver diseases, which include an array of different, sometimes rare, conditions that often lead to lifelong medication and meticulous dietary management.
“Metabolic liver diseases mainly involve patients whose liver is unable to sufficiently produce a certain type of enzyme to metabolize body waste because of genetic disorders, causing a number of nervous system and vascular conditions,” hospital director of surgery Lin Jen-kou (林楨國) told a news conference in Taipei.
Lin said that while some of the diseases can be managed with medications and special diets, others cannot and can cause irreversible damage to the body, which prompted the hospital’s rare condition center a few years ago to explore abnother approach that could eradicate the disease and improve patients’ quality of life.
Hospital Department of Pediatric Surgery physician Liu Chin-su (劉君恕) said the team then decided to opt for liver transplants and has since used the procedure to significantly improve the symptoms of 21 patients with metabolic liver diseases, with an overall success rate of 95 percent.
“Among them were three people with ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency, a genetic disorder of the urea cycle that occurs in about one out of every 80,000 people; 10 cases with methylmalonic acidemia, an inherited illness that affects one out of every 50,000 people and in which the body is unable to properly process certain proteins; and one patient with the extremely rare disorder of homocystinuria,” Liu said.
Lin said the latter case is a 28-year-old man surnamed Chen (陳) who is the first documented Asian case in medical history of homocystinuria detected through newborn screening.
Homocystinuria is a rare inherited metabolic disorder caused by cystathionine beta synthase deficiency, which affects about one out of 500,000 men in Taiwan, Lin said.
Lin added that affected people can experience abnormal accumulation of homocysteine, detachment of the crystalline lens inside the eye, a sunken chest and mental disability.
“Chen had sought to control the disorder via medicines and stringent dietary management for the first 22 years of his life, but the approach not only greatly impeded his academic and job performances, but also failed to prevent him from developing dislocation of the crystalline lens, which meant he had to undergo two surgical procedures in 2000,” Lin said.
After Chen and his family learned that liver transplantation could put an end to his misery, Lin said he readily agreed to the idea and received a donated liver in November 2009.
Now, Chen has broken free of dependence on medicine and dietary control and is planning to open his own coffee shop, Lin said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching