FRIDAY, Aug. 21 (HealthDay News) -- Kidney transplant patients have similar outcomes whether the donor is above or below the age of 5 years, according to a study published online Aug. 20 in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
Rubin Zhang, M.D., and colleagues at Tulane University in New Orleans conducted a study of 79 adult kidney transplant recipients, of whom 40 received kidneys from donors aged below 5 years, and 39 of whom received kidneys from donors aged 5 to 10 years.
Whereas 73 percent of the recipients of kidneys from donors under the age of 5 required urethral stents, only 38 percent of the older donor recipients needed this, and the former group also had more rejections, at 25 percent of the total versus 18 percent for the latter group, the investigators found. Both groups had similar rates of surgical complications, delayed graft function and development of proteinuria, and five-year survival rates were the same for both groups.
"To our knowledge, this is the first study to compare directly long-term outcomes of using single pediatric kidneys from very young donors with those from older pediatric donors," the authors write. "Although there were higher incidences of acute rejection and vascular thrombosis that caused three more graft losses in the younger donor group, there were equivalent patient survival and long-term graft survival in both groups."
Abstract
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