Soldato
Woman 'sacked after donating kidney to save boss's life'
- Thread starter Dr House
- Start date
Basically you have to have a suitable "match" for a kidney it is not down to blood group like other transplant. As that is more complicated then you set up a chain were say person A's donor give's to Person D, person D's donor gives to Person B, etc all down a long chain all operated on at the same time so people don't backdown etc once their friend/relative has got what they require.
If you are precluded from driving then you may well be precluded from donation.
Soldato
- Joined
- 17 Jun 2004
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- 3,691
Significantly higher but I couldn't give you a number because it depends on the age and ethnicity of the person in end-stage renal failure. For example, anyone under the age of 18 gets preference but people who come from ethnic minorities (especially Asian) are screwed as we get less donors from that population and therefore the chance of a match is less (the match is partly determined from factors related to ethnicity). Which is kind of ironic considering the prevalence of diabetes and resultant kidney failure in the Asian community.
Man of Honour
We have a patient in our Dialysis department who has been going for 44 years and has both legs amputated.
We also have the patient with the longest transplated kidney which is about 32 years now because they only normally last for around 10 years.
20 years now at least. I would expect longer with a live related donation.
Soldato
I would assume from a live donor it could, potentially, live as long as the donor would?
Because obviously if when I am 40 I get a kidney (though I hope I won't need one!) from a 70 year old, it won't last as long as a 20 year old live donor.
Well there are two factors that make live related better:
Live related will provide a better "match" (being related) therefore the body attacks the kidney as a "foreign invader" less. And as we use newer medicines such as Tacrolimus and MMF over the older ones (such as Ciclosporin) we can control this better.
As you control the surgery etc what we call the cold ischaemic time is reduced ie the time the kidney is out of the body in ice. Naturally a kidney will be damaged if being driven from Manchester to London for due to normal process (even in ice). This will impact overall lifespan.
Older donors are often not so suitable anyway as the actual mechanism of death needs to be quite specific to actually fulfill the criteria to be a suitable donor. Most people are not suitable due to disease processes etc and this is especially applicable with the elderly. Naturally the duration depends on surgical skill, good nursing afterwards, general health in the recipient and their compliance with their medication regime and then the one that has really increased the lifespans in recent time - advances in immunosuppressive medication.
Man of Honour
Up until 2 years ago I used to take students into the Dialysis department on a monthly basis where the Matron would give the talk and she always said '10 years'.
It was also an answer on the Education sheets we gave out that the Renal Department had put together.
Tell her she needs to update its part of the NMC Code of Conduct.
It is only recently since the introduction of FK506 and MMF etc that the jump has occurred so she only needed to be a couple of years out of date two years ago to make that assumption. I am sure a quick google will give the same figures she does however an academic search would indicate the figures I am talking about. Pre-emptive transplantation also gives a big boost when compared to longterm dialysis pre-transplant. It is again only recently we have pushed that practice.
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