Match up live kidney donors, researcher urges
Posted on: Tuesday, 4 October 2005, 15:02 CDT
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A trading scheme among patients with access to live kidney donors is needed to more readily match recipients and organs because differing blood types are blocking transplants, said the authors of a study published on Tuesday.
A trial program at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine that used a trading strategy among patients with access to live kidney donors resulted in successful transplants in 21 out of 22 cases over a three-year period, the report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association said.
Existing transplant programs match deceased donors with patients on the waiting list for kidneys -- which currently numbers more than 63,000 patients in the United States alone.
"A similar system now needs to be in place for living donors," lead author Dr. Robert Montgomery of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, said in a statement.
Between 2,000 and 3,500 U.S. patients suffering from renal failure have willing live donors, but more than one-third are blocked from receiving the organs by incompatible blood types or a condition where the recipient is especially sensitive to foreign tissue and must be matched carefully, he said.
Montgomery estimated a trading system could successfully pair off half the patients with access to live donors.
There are several good reasons for creating such a living donor kidney registry, but ethical dilemmas could arise, an accompanying editorial in the journal said.
"For example, what if one kidney fails early but the other functions well?" wrote Arthur Matas and David Sutherland of the University of Minnesota.
"Kidney transplantation remains a success story, but its promise and future continue to be threatened by the ongoing lack of suitable organ donors. While new methods to overcome this problem are welcome, the transplant community must face up to the new ethical issues that surround every advance," the editorial said.
Source: REUTERS
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