November 17, 2015 – Kidney Donation Risk

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Anchor lead:  A new tool may help you decide if you’d like to donate a kidney, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Just how risky is donating one of your kidneys?  A new risk calculator developed by Morgan Grams and colleagues at Johns Hopkins, and published in the New England Journal of Medicines, aims to help you find out.

Grams: We developed an online tool to project the long term risk of end stage renal disease in candidates for living kidney donor donation.  And this risk tool incorporates many characteristics as opposed to single characteristics, which is what’s been used previously.   :14

This multitude of factors helps develop a more comprehensive picture of risk, Gram says.

Grams: This tool encapsulates 10 characteristics that are specific to you and gives an estimate of the absolute risk of end stage renal disease over a certain period of time, say 15 years.   :11

Gram says the success of paired kidney donation programs such as the one at Johns Hopkins has gotten more people thinking about donating a kidney of their own, and this tool should help inform that decision.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.