National Kidney Month: Older Americans Can Give and Receive the Gift of Life with Kidney Transplantation

March 10, 2006

Winston-Salem NC /PRNewswire/ -- Amidst the observance of National Kidney Month, a Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center researcher says there is much to celebrate in light of recent major strides in increasing the number of potential kidney donors.

"National Kidney Month is the perfect time to highlight the need for organ donors and advances that make it possible for more people - including older adults - to give and to receive the gift of life through kidney transplantation," said Robert Stratta, M.D., director of transplantation at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center.

People age 50 and older now account for about half of the 65,540 people in the United States awaiting a kidney transplant. And, by expanding criteria and allowing older people to donate kidneys, the number of transplants performed at Wake Forest Baptist has more than doubled in the last few years.

Stratta and his group have been using expanded criteria donors (ECDs) -- donors who are over 60 years of age or donors over age 50 with various pre-existing conditions -- with promising results. Critical factors in success include matching donors to recipients based on body size, selecting low-risk patients, using sophisticated organ preservation methods, and treating patients with drugs designed to reduce rejection rates and minimize kidney damage.

In about a four-year period, Stratta and his team performed 244 kidney transplants from deceased donors into adult recipients. A total of 101 (41 percent) of these kidneys were from ECDs; many of these kidneys were refused by other transplant centers and targeted for discard. Stratta's figures show similar four-year patient and kidney graft survival rates between ECD kidneys and standard-criteria (younger-donor) kidneys.

"We are matching based on age, weight, and kidney function. An older donor kidney has less capacity and someone waiting for a kidney who is older and weighs less doesn't need as much capacity," Stratta said.

Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center is an academic health system comprised of North Carolina Baptist Hospital and Wake Forest University Health Sciences, which operates the university's School of Medicine. The system comprises 1,187 acute care, psychiatric, rehabilitation and long-term care beds and is consistently ranked as one of "America's Best Hospitals" by U.S. News & World Report.

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This article posted March 28, 2006.