April 9, 2019 – HIV Risk

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Anchor lead: Does having HIV make kidney transplantation more risky? Elizabeth Tracey reports

HIV infection today is a chronic, manageable condition, so much so that life expectancy for someone with HIV is essentially the same as someone without the virus. Dorry Segev, one of the transplant surgeons at Johns Hopkins who performed the recent kidney transplant between two HIV positive people, says the risks for both should be the same as if they weren’t infected.

Segev: The risk for an HIV positive kidney donor we don’t fully know because nobody has ever done this before but the science seems to suggest that it’s not much higher than the risk for anybody else without HIV to donate. On the recipient side the risk of getting transplanted with HIV is no higher than the risk of getting transplanted without HIV, and in fact, the benefit of the transplant is higher for patients with HIV because they don’t do as well on dialysis.  :30

Segev notes that medications used to keep HIV in check don’t interfere with those needed after kidney transplant. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.