One is as good as two, it seems, when it comes to kidneys. For kidney donors live as long as those who don’t donate, says a study published March 10 in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association—60 years after the first kidney transplant in the U.S. The study found no increase in mortality in donors once they recover from the operation.
Each year, more than 6,000 healthy people in the U.S. donate a kidney to someone they know. About half are blood relatives of the kidney recipient. The other half are spouses, friends or acquaintances. But about 100 come forward wishing to anonymously give the gift of glomeruli (the basic filtration units of the kidney) to someone they've never met.
Transplant surgeon Dorry Segev and his team from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore studied mortality among 80,000 kidney donors over the past 15 years, comparing them to healthy people with both kidneys.
"All these folks are heroes making a big difference in someone else's life," says Dorry Segev, describing the willingness of donors "to undergo an operation which carries a risk and gives them no benefit." You only need one kidney to live. But the operation required to remove a kidney and the risk of developing disease in the remaining one later in life make the decision to donate not one to be taken lightly. "It's our job to quantify the risks and make sure those risks stay as small as they can," Segev says. "With this study we're able to say that whatever happens to people physiologically after kidney donation—it doesn't cause a premature death," Segev says. "After donating a kidney a person can live exactly the way they lived before donating—a long, healthy, active life with virtually no restrictions at all."
