Many people believe that by donating a kidney, their kidney function will worsen in time, but this is not necessarily true, according to researchers from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Lead author Dr. Hassan N. Ibrahim and his colleagues reported their findings in the latest edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. According to them, kidney donors may enjoy a normal and healthy life as their non-donor counterparts, a fact that puts to rest many fears regarding kidney donation.
Dr. Ibrahim said the study “indicates that kidney donors have a normal life span, a healthy status that is similar to that of the general population, and an excellent quality of life. I’m hoping that this will alleviate the anxiety about living with one kidney.”
For the study, Dr. Ibrahim and his team analyzed data for 3,698 individuals who donated kidneys from 1963 to 2007 at the university’s transplant center. Some 255 donors were randomly selected to undergo kidney and other tests. Then their results were compared with health outcomes for the general population.
The researchers found that 268 donors died overall, a number that was comparable to survival in the general population. Furthermore, 11 people developed renal failure by the end of the study, which would translate to a rate of 180 cases per million people per year, while in the general population the rate would be 268 cases per million per year.
However, most of the donors undergoing tests had good kidney function and reported an excellent quality of life. This results can give donators confidence that their own health will not be compromised, said Dr. Bryan Becker, president of the National Kidney Foundation and a surgeon at the University of Wisconsin, who was not involved in the research.
The findings of the study were not surprising keeping in mind that people who want to donate kidneys have to be in better shape than others in the general population, Jane C. Tan, MD, and Glenn Chertow, MD, of the Stanford University School of Medicine say in an accompanying editorial. Generally, donors have to be young and showing no symptoms of high blood pressure or diabetes or any other condition leading to kidney disease at the time of donation.
According to the National Kidney Foundation, the number of people with renal failure keeps growing at an astronomical rate, 90,000 new cases per year, mostly due to an increase in cases of diabetes and obesity, two main factors leading to kidney failure. Last year, 8,816 kidney transplants were done with organs from deceased donors and 4,927 from living donors, making kidneys the most commonly transplanted organ in the United States, the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, reported.
