Mar 03, 2014 – Minimal Risk

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Health newsfeed for Monday, March 3, 2014

ANCHOR LEAD: LIVE KIDNEY DONATION PRESENTS A VERY SMALL RISK TO THE DONOR, ELIZABETH TRACEY REPORTS

Live kidney donation, where a living donor chooses to allow one of their kidneys to be removed for transplantation, is increasingly popular as paired donation strategies allow incompatible donors and recipients to pair up in ways that benefit all.  Now a study by Dorry Segev and colleagues at Johns Hopkins demonstrates that the risk to the living donor is very small indeed.

SEGEV: Thousands of people donate kidneys every year, and it’s our obligation as a medical community to understand as much as we possibly can about the risks these folks take when they donate a kidney.  What we did in this study of about 100,000 living donors is we tried to answer the question of how much extra risk is there of kidney disease when you donate a kidney versus not donating a kidney? We were please to discover that this risk is actually very low.   :31

The risk of subsequent kidney disease for the donor is about 0.3%.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.