Background

Kidney Paired Donation (KPD) is a rapidly growing modality for facilitating living donor renal transplantation (LDRTx) for patients who are incompatible with their healthy living donors.

In a proposed KPD match, if an old donor–recipient pair is matched to a younger donor–recipient pair, young recipient may feel disadvantaged and therefore may be unwilling for exchange with an older donor. Refusal to participate in an exchange could limit the success of KPD program when donor pool is small.

Material and Methods

This was a single center study of 1502 patients on regular follow-up, who underwent LDRTx from 1999 to 2012. Donor–recipient age difference was divided into two groups group1 with 0-20 years difference (n=705) and group 2 (n=797) with 21- 40 years difference.

Outcome measures included graft survival, patient survival and rejection rates.

Results

One, five and ten- year patient survival (Figure 1) showed no significant difference between the 2 groups (94.5%, 83.2%, 71.9% vs. 95.2%, 86%, 77.8%, p 0.053).

Graft survival (Figure 2) also showed no significant difference (94.6%, 81.6%, 72.1% vs. 94%, 80%, 72.2%, p 0.989).

Acute and chronic rejection incidence were also similar (17.5% vs 16.5%, p >0.86; and 7.8% vs 6.8%, p 0.44).

Conclusions

The age of a donor has little impact on the survival of transplanted kidney. Results of this study could persuade more people to take part in KPD programs. This study is important for policy/decision making in KPD when donor pool is limited.

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