A new study found that donating a kidney doesn’t affect long-term health for the donor.
It was discovered by researchers at the University of Minnesota that people who donated a kidney were able to live as long as a normal person, and they matched the population in general for being healthy.
In general, kidney donation has been believed to be safe, however there are always risks with any surgery. This new research, involving almost 3,700 donors and spanning more than 40 years, is the longest and largest study to observe long-term results. Their findings were reported in the January 29, 2009 issue of New England Journal of Medicine.
As more people are willing to donate and newer and better surgery techniques have reduced recovery time, living donation is on the increase. More than a third of the 16,629 transplanted kidneys in the U.S. came from living donors in 2007, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.
The leader of the study, Dr. Hassan Ibrahim, as well as his colleagues, were eager to find out what happened to the 3,698 people who donated a kidney at the university since 1963. They tried to track down everyone and looked at government records to see who were deceased. A random selection of 255 donors were used to have tests done on them. Their health results were compared with outcomes from the healthy general population.
In all,268 of the donors had died, but this was comparable to the survival of the general population. Only eleven donors experienced kidney failure many years later and they needed a transplant or dialysis. The rate of kidney failure in the donors was actually lower than what was reported from the general population, according to the researchers.
Excess fluid and waste are filtered by kidneys. The options are dialysis or a transplant if your kidneys fail. There are more than 78,000 people on the national waiting list to receive a kidney from a deceased donor. With the increase in obesity and diabetes, the need for kidneys has increased dramatically and the wait can occur for many years.