Cardiac arrest victims donates viable kidney
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-08-02 10:35 NEW YORK - People who are transplanted with a
kidney from a victim of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest do very well, new
research suggests.
In the United States, transplanted kidneys come from "beating-heart" donors,
who include living individuals and those declared brain dead. Previous reports
have shown acceptable outcomes when using kidneys from in-hospital cardiac
arrest victims, but it was unclear if the same applied to organs taken from
out-of-hospital arrest victims.
To investigate, Dr. Ana I. Sanchez-Fructuoso, from Hospital Clinico San
Carlos in Madrid, and colleagues compared the outcomes of 320 transplant
patients who received a kidney from a non-beating-heart donor and 584 who
received a kidney from a beating-heart donor, some of whom were older than 60
years of age.
The investigators report in the Annals of Internal Medicine that the survival
rates of the grafted organ at 1 year and 5 years for the non-beating-heart group
were 87 percent and 82 percent, respectively. These rates were comparable to the
corresponding rates in the younger beating-heart group, 91 percent and 85
percent, but significantly better than the rates in the older beating-heart
group, 80 percent and 73 percent.
"Non-heart-beating donors are a viable potential source of ... kidneys for
transplantation," the researchers conclude. "We encourage transplant centers to
consider the use of non-heart-beating donors."
SOURCE: Annals of Internal Medicine, August 1, 2006.
|
