Why Living Donor Transplants?
Patients with kidney failure or end stage renal disease (ESRD) have several options for treatment, including hemodialysis, peritoneal dialysis, and renal transplant.

• The one- and five-year patient survival rates on dialysis are currently 78% and 32%, respectively.
• The one- and five-year patient survival rates following kidney transplantation are greater than 95% and 85%, respectively.

Transplantation can significantly extend the life of ESRD patients. Kidneys for transplantation are made available through deceased donors and living donors.

Deceased Donor: A person who has died and agreed to donate their organs for transplantation. Donated organs are given to people on the national organ transplant waiting list.

Living Donor: A person who (while alive) gives one of his/her own kidneys to someone who needs one.

Living donor kidney transplants achieve long-term results that are significantly better than deceased donor transplants and they eliminate the risk of patient deterioration or death while on the wait list.

As a result, the UT Southwestern Kidney Transplant Team strongly encourages patients to actively pursue living donor kidney transplantation whenever possible.

Types of Living Donations

There are four types of living donations:

• Living Related Donation: A donation from a blood relative such as a mother, father, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, or cousin
• Living Unrelated Donation: A donation from someone who is not a blood relative such as a spouse, friend, co-worker, relative-in-law, or church member.
• Non-Directed Donation: The living donor does not direct their donation to a specific individual, but rather to the most compatible person on the wait list.
• Paired Donation: A donor may want to give a kidney to a family member or friend, but cannot because testing shows they are medically incompatible.

The donor may have the wrong blood type or the recipient may have immunity to the donor’s kidney. In this case, the potential donor and the recipient decide together to enter a paired donation program. Paired donation programs match the donor and recipient with another incompatible donor/recipient pair and the kidneys are exchanged between the pairs.

Benefits of Living Donation

Living donor kidney transplants have several advantages over transplants from deceased donors.

Better Results: According to the U.S. Procurement and Transplantation Network, living donation provides for better “allograft” (another name for the transplanted kidney) and patient survival than deceased donor transplantation (see charts below). The Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients shows the most recent results data for the UT Southwestern Medical Center (University Hospital – St. Paul).

• Better Health: Living donor transplantation allows recipients to have their transplants sooner and spend as little time as possible on dialysis. As a result, most patients are in better overall health at the time of transplant.
• Better Quality Kidney: During a living donor transplant, the recipient and donor surgeries are performed at the same time. The surgeon places the new kidney into the recipient immediately after removal from the donor. This means the living donor kidney is without blood supply for only a very short time as compared to a deceased donor kidney. As a result, kidneys from living donors tend to have fewer complications, typically function immediately, and do better overall in the long term. Additionally, recipients of living donor kidney transplants experience less rejection and may be able to be maintained on fewer anti-rejection medications at lower doses after surgery.
• Better Prepared: Living donation transplants can be scheduled when both the donor and recipient are in the best condition for surgery. As a planned surgery, it allows the recipient to plan ahead for time off from work, child care, and home care during recovery.

Who Can Be a Kidney Donor?
A living donor should be:

• 18 years of age or older
• In good mental and physical health
• Voluntarily willing and fully prepared to undertake the transplant process

Age, gender, and race are not factors in determining a successful match. Every potential donor is evaluated on an individual basis.