MADISON - Kidney transplants between siblings with slightly different tissue types are as much as 28 percent more likely to survive long-term when maternal tissue types are used to determine the donor, a new study from the University of Wisconsin Medical School suggests.
The research suggests that a small change in organ selection could boost long term success rates for slightly mismatched transplants to equal that of the ideal donor, an identically matched sibling, according to William Burlingham, Ph.D., a UW Medical School transplant scientist.
The study, prompted by a kidney recipient who showed surprising transplant tolerance without anti-rejection drugs, is described by Burlingham in the Dec. 3 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Researchers studied records for 205 people who received a kidney from a brother or sister at nine transplant centers in the United States and the Netherlands. Kidneys from siblings with maternal tissue types were 19 and 28 percent more likely to survive five and 10 years after transplantation, respectively, than kidneys from siblings with paternal traits, according to the team's findings. Those results closely parallel success rates for perfectly matched, or HLA-identical, transplants.
"Simply adding maternal HLA typing (or paternal typing if the mother is unavailable) to the routine family workup for living-related kidney donation will expand the pool of optimal donors, giving transplant surgeons a viable alternative when no HLA-identical sibling is available," said Burlingham, a UW Medical School assistant professor of surgery, pathology and laboratory medicine. The research may also aid in unrelated kidney donations and stem cell transplants.
Kidneys are the most frequently transplanted organs. The 12,300 kidneys
transplanted during 1997 comprised nearly 59 percent of U.S. transplants. In
1996, the last year for which full figures are available, 7 in 10 transplanted
kidneys came from cadaveric donors
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Contact: Scott Hainzinger
shainzin@facstaff.wisc.edu
608-263-3223
University of Wisconsin-Madison
2-Dec-1998