Women With Kidney Transplants as Adult or Child Have Similar Pregnancy Outcomes

Pregnancy outcomes appear to be similar for women who undergo kidney transplants as children or adults, reports a new study.

An article published by JAMA Pediatrics reports that pregnancy outcomes appear to be similar for women who undergo kidney transplants as children or adults.

Melanie L. Wyld, M.B.B.S., M.B.A., M.P.H., of Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, New South Wales, Australia, and co-authors compared pregnancy outcomes for women who had kidney transplantation in childhood (less than 18 years of age; child-tx mothers) with women who had kidney transplantation in adulthood (18 years or older; adult-tx mothers).

About Transplantation
Since the early times, the novel idea of transplanting tissues and other body parts from one organism to the other has captured the imagination of successive generations.

The study results show that live births resulted from 76 percent of pregnancies in child-tx mothers and 77 percent of pregnancies in adult-tx mothers. The incidence of premature babies, that is, less than 37 weeks gestation was 45 percent in child-tx mothers and 53 percent in adult-tx mothers.

The study included all women with a functioning kidney transplant included in the Australia and New Zealand dialysis and transplant registry and had at least one pregnancy reported between 1963 and 2012.

Authors identified a total of 101 pregnancies in 66 child-tx mothers and 626 pregnancies in 401 adult-tx mothers. At the time of pregnancy, the child-tx mothers were an average age of 25 and had a functioning transplant for 10 years, while adult-tx mothers were an average age of 31 with a functioning transplant for six years.

Paired Donor Exchange Kidney Transplantation
Paired donor exchange kidney transplantation is a process in which unrelated kidney donors are matched to recipients so that compatible transplants can be performed.

Preterm babies born to both sets of mothers were small for gestational age, 22 percent for child-tx mothers and 10 percent for adult-tx mothers. 57 percent term babies born to child-tx and 38 percent born to adult-tx mothers were frequently small for gestational age, both significantly more frequently than babies born at term in the general population.

The outcomes for child-tx mothers are similar to that of adult-tx mothers. The mothers and their physicians should be comforted that early onset of kidney failure and longer period of post transplant exposure to immuno-suppression do not adversely affect their pregnancy outcomes.