Study: Kidney Transplants From Non-Heart-Beating Donors a Success

A new Swiss study has provided evidence for the first time that kidney transplants from non-heart-beating donors are every bit as successful as the far more common transplants from donors who have been declared brain dead.

Physicians at the University Hospital Zurich performed 122 transplants of kidneys from donors without a heartbeat between 1985 and the year 2000 and compared the results to 122 transplants from donors with a heartbeat but no brain activity.

They reported in The New England Journal of Medicine that the 10-year survival rate for transplanted kidneys was 78.7 percent for organs from non-heart-beating donors and 76.7 percent for organs from brain-dead donors.

While the researchers reported that the incidence of delayed graft function -- where the transplanted kidney is slow to start functioning -- was twice as high in patients receiving organs from non-heart-beating donors, the researchers concluded that "there is no difference in long-term outcome between the two types of graft.

"The results are exactly the same as for brain-dead donors," said Dr. Pierre-Alain Clavien, chairman of visceral surgery and transplantation at the Zurich hospital .

With the number of patients waiting for kidney transplants now at 52,000 and rising, the rreport may encourage transplant centers and organ procurement organizations to further increase their efforts to retrieve kidneys from non-heart-beating donors.

Kidneys were retrieved from fewer than 200 non-heart-beating donors in the United States in the year 2001.