Researchers of a new study emphasize on the importance of physicians checking the physical health of kidney donors before they donate their organ.
Owing to the growing demand for organ donations, especially kidneys, physicians often land up taking organs without doing a background medical check of the donor. According to statistics, in more than a third of kidney transplantations performed in the United States, the transplanted organs come from live donors. Though the risks involved in kidney donation is very small, researchers of a new study state that it is important that physicians check the physical health of kidney donors before they donate their organs.
The new study conducted by researchers from the American Society of Nephrology (ASN) looked into the trends in the illnesses and complications experienced by donors. For this, they examined the health conditions of over 69,000 donors between 1998 and 2010. This number accounted for 89% of kidney donors in the United States at that time.
They made quite a few observations. The first one was that complications while donating kidneys declined from 10.1% in 1998 to 7.6% in 2010. Also, the duration a donor needed to be hospitalized after making a kidney donation decreased from 3.7 days in 1998 to 2.5 days in 2010. Both these factors also resulted in relatively low risk abdominal surgeries such as appendectomies. However, they did find that obesity, depression, hypertension and hypothyroidism among donors increased from 1998 to 2010. Exact numbers were not provided.
"We were able to characterize certain patient characteristics and outcomes that are not available from standard transplant registries," said Dr. Jesse Schold, PhD (Cleveland Clinic). "The data provide important information about the incidence and impact of pre-existing comorbidities among living donors that are not broadly known."
Krista Lentine, MD, PhD (Saint Louis University School of Medicine) and Dorry Segev, MD (Johns Hopkins University) who provided an accompanying editorial said that the findings of this new study are very important as it can help physicians "use this information to guide their own quality assessment and process improvement benchmarking for donor outcomes."
"Ultimately, by improving understanding of the short- and long-term health outcomes among representative, diverse samples of living donors, the transplant community can meaningfully improve the processes of consent, selection, and care that are vital priorities," they wrote in the editorial.
According to statistics, as of last month, there are currently 96,645 patients waiting for kidney transplants. Last year, 16,812 kidney transplants took place in the U.S. Of these, 11,043 kidney transplants came from deceased donors and 5,769 came from live donors.
