All across the nation, patients with kidney disorders have only one option in order to live a normal life without undergoing dialysis multiple times a week: obtaining a kidney transplant. Oftentimes the transplanted kidney comes in the form of deceased donor kidney transplantation (a situation where a kidney becomes available from an individual who has volunteered their organs for donation upon their death). However, this option has countless variables such as whether the deceased individual will match the patient's blood work or whether the patient is even eligible for a transplant at the time of the donor's death.
Another, more controlled, option is that of live kidney donation from someone who is willing and able to donate one of their two functioning kidneys. However, the issue with live kidney donation is that oftentimes the availability of people willing to donate a kidney is scarce.
As a result, researchers have been attempting to increase the pool of potential donors by various methods such as "incompatible kidney transplantation, kidney-paired transplantation[…]and the use of organs from donors who may have previously been excluded." One group of individuals that had previously been excluded from donation is those in the age group over 70 years, an exclusion that may be unwise based on a surprising new finding.
This area of kidney donors was the topic of study for a group of researchers from the Hopkins School of Medicine looking to get a more accurate picture of whether kidneys donated from those over 70 were comparable to kidneys from younger donors, more specifically those in the age range of 50 to 59. While previous studies had looked at the viability of old-age donor kidneys, the Hopkins team took their approach differently, ensuring strict controls in an attempt to eliminate factors leading to kidney failure that were not a result of the age of the kidney.
The study found 219 people between the ages of 70 and 84 who had donated a kidney between 1990 and 2010. Over that same time frame there were 16,062 kidney donors between the ages of 50 and 59. From this data, the researchers looked at kidney failure and patient death over a 10 year span and compared those numbers between patients who had received a kidney from an older donor versus patients receiving kidneys from younger donors.
Not surprisingly, kidney failure was higher in patients with older kidney donors (33.3 versus 21.6 percent). However, interestingly enough the rate of patient death was the same for both groups of patients. Through this new study, Hopkins researchers were able to statistically prove that individuals over 70 can donate a kidney, and recipients do not have to fear the possibility of an inferior organ.
While the researchers do admit it is still optimal for a younger patient to receive a younger kidney, that option is not always feasible. The average time on the kidney transplant waiting list is 10 years, and in that time there is a high risk of death. As a result, while a younger kidney may be less susceptible to failure, the risks of waiting outweigh the benefits.
Ultimately receiving kidney donations from an older individual still has the same hurdles as any other kidney donation such as finding a willing and matching donor. However, Dorry L. Segev, one of the leading researchers in the study, recommends that receiving an older kidney sooner is certainly the safer option over waiting for a younger kidney from a deceased donor.
The fact that individuals over 70 do have kidneys that are healthy enough for donation is a step towards broadening the chance that patients in waiting can find a potential match. While the researchers acknowledge their sample size of older donors was limited, the study remains the largest of its kind, and any method of working towards finding a larger donor pool can be seen as a success towards patient care.
