This study may attempt to ease a lot of apprehensions faced by potential kidney donors about their health condition following the donation. In a revolutionary study of over 80,000 live kidney donors from across the United States, Johns Hopkins experts have apparently discovered that the procedure seems to bring exceedingly less medical threat and that, in the long run, people who donate one of their kidneys are expected to live just as long as those who seemed to have two fit ones.
The results of this study corroborate what doctors have apparently known for quite some time that kidney donation, which saves the life of the receiver, appears to have little danger to the donor.
“Donating a kidney is safe. Live donors start healthy and it’s the highest priority of the surgeon and the entire transplant community to make sure they stay healthy. This study says we have succeeded. While there are never any guarantees with surgery, donating a kidney is safer than undergoing almost any other operation,” commented, transplant surgeon Dorry L. Segev, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Segev and his colleagues observed data from a national registry of roughly 80,347 live kidney donors in the US from April 1, 1994 to March 31, 2009. There were supposedly roughly 25 deaths in the initial 90 days following donation surgery over the course of those 15 years, thereby putting the threat of surgical mortality at 3.1 per 10,000 cases. The danger was said to be somewhat more for a few subgroups that may usually encompass elevated risk from surgery namely, men with 5.1 deaths per 10,000 cases and African-Americans with 7.6 deaths per 10,000 cases but the danger in those groups were believed to be still extremely minute.
By contrast, Segev remarked that the threat of surgical mortality from gallbladder removal is approximately six times more i.e. 18 per 10,000 cases, while the danger from non-donor nephrectomy, eradicating a kidney due to cancer or a different medical reason is roughly 260 per 10,000 cases, 100 times the danger of donating a kidney.
In the investigation, the study team seems to have discovered that the threat to kidney donors apparently stayed low even as the amount of live donor kidney transplants in the US almost increased two-fold since the past 15 years from 3,009 in 1994 to 5,968 in 2008. Patients with kidney failure have apparently been depending more and more on live kidney donors who step forward to provide one of their kidneys to a friend or family member in need since there seems to be a profound organ shortage in the United States, and live donor transplants are inclined to live more as compared to those from cadavers.
Preceding studies of live donors have apparently been conducted at single-transplant centers with homogenous populations. Segev’s study is claimed to be the first to utilize national data.
The findings were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
