Jul 31, 2008 5:56 pm US/Eastern
New Research Explains Kidney Transplant Rejections
BALTIMORE (WJZ) ―
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Local research is revealing new information about why some kidney transplant patients fare better than others when it comes to organ rejection.
CBS
Local research is revealing new information about why some kidney transplant patients fare better than others when it comes to organ rejection.
Healthwatch reporter Kellye Lynn reports Johns Hopkins' doctors have discovered that one approach appears to offer the best long-term survival.
At this minute, there are more than 70,000 people waiting for a kidney transplant. For the fortunate ones who do get an organ, it will likely come from a live donor transplant or from someone who has died as a result of brain death.
Nearly two years ago,
Eyewitness News was there as Sheila Thornton and several other organ recipients celebrated the success of a simultaneous five-way kidney swap.
Today, Sheila's kidney is functioning well, and so is she.
"It was a gift, a very unexpected gift," said Sheila.
While Sheila's organ came from a living donor, about 50 percent of transplant patients receive organs from deceased donors.
Many of the organs transplanted from cadavers come from people who died of brain death, but those organs are not always the best fit for African- American patients.
"Certain groups of recipients don't do as well as some of the other groups of recipients. They're more likely to have rejection in the first five years," said Dr. Daniel Warren, Johns Hopkins Medicine.
In an effort to understand why, Dr. Warren and a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins analyzed the outcomes of more than 25,000 African-American adults who received a donated kidney from a cadaver.
They found organ rejection was far less likely when the kidney came from a person who lost their life to cardiac death.
"We were surprised to find this group of African-Americans actually do much better than the literature would predict and that's the new finding," said Dr. Warren.
The study showed African-Americans who received a kidney from an African-American cardiac death donor had a 70 percent reduction in their risk of kidney loss and a 59 percent lower risk of death than those who got a kidney from a white donor who died of brain death.
The next step at Hopkins is to launch another study to explore why this seems to be the case.
Many of the people currently waiting for a kidney will die waiting. To reduce the organ shortage, researchers urge you to sign up for organ donation when you get your driver's license.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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