Patient and graft outcomes from older living kidney donors are similar to those from younger donors despite lower GFR

Abstract

Older donor age does not preclude excellent results from living-donor kidney transplantation but should be appreciated as being associated with relatively lower GFR.

Living Kidney Donors: Impact of Age on Long-Term Safety

“…We even included a group of 25 donors older than 70 years. The average age in this study is relatively high, in particular when compared to American studies (16)(17)(18). Results of the present study may encourage other centers to include healthy older donors.…”

Prevalence of abdominal aortic calcifications in older living renal donors and its effect on graft function and histology

“…The threshold of 130 HU was selected because it is a commonly used threshold for CT assessment of coronary arterial calcification and is the recommended threshold by the software vendor. The total AAC volume score for each patient was then obtained by summing the scores of all individual calcifications and reflected the total volume (in mm 3 ) of the calcifications present in the abdominal aorta. This calcification volume scoring technique has been applied to the quantification of coronary artery and abdominal aortic calcification previously [7].…”

“…Over the last five decades, there has been a steady increase in the median age of the living kidney donor [1,2], and in 2011, over one-quarter of all living kidney donors were ≥50 years old. Although this expansion of the donor pool to include older donors has helped to mitigate the shortage of organs while achieving similar short-term graft survival rates [3], it has been demonstrated that increasing living donor age is associated with lower recipient glomerular filtration rate (GFR) and reduced long-term graft survival, especially for younger recipients [3,4]. Gaining a better understanding of the factors that affect outcomes of older living kidneys can improve screening and selection of potential donors and allow us to tailor immunosuppression and optimize the medical management in the recipients.…”

Renal Transplantation from Expanded Criteria Donors

“…He proposed old living donors an important option for elderly transplantation (Gill et al, 2008). There are other few studies in the literature that found encouraging results with elderly living donor transplants (Kumar et al, 2000;De La Vega, 2004). Graft survival, patient survival, degree of hypertension and renal function were similar in elderly and young living donor transplant groups.…”