AKI and Transplant

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Anchor lead: One way to make more kidneys available for transplant is to use those that may have some injury, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Kidneys are in short supply for transplant, with thousands of people on transplant lists in the US alone. Now new research by Chirag Parikh, director of nephrology at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues, has shown that using kidneys for transplant that may have acute kidney injury does not compromise their function or survival in the transplant recipient.

Parikh: In deceased donors when a person died if they had acute kidney injury the surgeons thought that the kidney was not of sufficient quality and should not be transplanted because it would have a shorter life. What happens when we compared kidneys that were transplanted with acute kidney injury versus kidneys that were the same in every other way but did not have acute kidney injury?  To our surprise we saw that the five years survival of the kidneys was not different.  :29

Parikh notes that acute kidney injury is often transient and the kidney will ultimately heal and function well, so using such organs could help the many people who are waiting on transplant lists. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.