Live kidney donors suffer minimal health problems and 90 per cent would strongly encourage other people to a become a donor if a partner or family member needed a transplant, according to a study of more than 300 people published in the December issue of the UK-based urology journal BJU International.
Researchers from Egypt, where live donations are currently the only legal option, carried out detailed evaluations of 339 patients who attended follow-up clinics between January 2002 and January 2007.
Based at a centre which performs about 100 live donor transplants a year, they included patients who had donated kidneys between 1976 and the end of 2001 in their research.
“Living donors remain the main option in developing countries where donations from dead donors have yet to establish roots, because of the lack of infrastructure or the implementation of legal criteria for brain death” explains lead author Dr Amgad E El-Agroudy from the Urology and Nephrology Center at Mansoura University.
“Even in developing countries, the increasing demand for kidneys has resulted in a rapid increase in the number of living donors being used. This had led to concerns about the risk involved in the procedure and its long-term consequences.”
All of the people who took part in the study underwent an extensive physical and psychosocial assessment, which included a full range of laboratory tests and detailed medical history. Any medical problems were then compared with health tables for the general population.
The researchers found that the live donors studied had good kidney function and tended to suffer a lower incidence of high blood pressure, diabetes and heart-related deaths than the general Egyptian population.
However, the authors point out that donors have to have good general health, at the time of the transplant, including normal blood pressure, to even be considered for the procedure and this could account for some of the results.
90 per cent of the donors who took part in the study said that they would make the same decision again if a family member or partner needed a kidney and would strongly encourage others to become donors.
47 donors went on to have 65 babies between them, including 25 who had their first baby after surgery
1,200 kidney transplants using live donors are carried out in Egypt every year, where the incidence of end-stage kidney disease is 200 people in every million.
In the current study, almost two-third of the donors (62 per cent) were women and the sample included people who had donated five to thirty years ago, with an average gap of 11 years between surgery and follow-up.
37 per cent had donated a kidney to their child, 47 per cent to a brother or sister and 16 per cent to a spouse or partner.