A patient with kidney failure awaiting a transplant in the operating theater of the Saint-Louis hospital in Paris was able to receive a kidney transplant that had been transplanted into another patient ten years ago.
- French teams have successfully re-transplanted a kidney graft already transplanted into a patient more than 10 years ago.
- Kidney transplantation remains the best treatment available for the more than 85,000 people who suffer from end-stage renal failure in France.
This is the first time in France that such an intervention with “re-sampling and re-transplantation” of an organ already removed and transplanted several years previously has taken place, and it is a success!
The kidney graft in question was taken from a former patient with renal insufficiency, hospitalized in intensive care at the Lariboisière hospital in Paris, following a massive vascular accident and transplanted from a kidney more than 10 years ago, AP-HP said in a statement.
He had been the subject of a treatment stoppage following a collegial decision.
Serve a second time
“His” perfectly functional kidney graft was therefore able to be used a second time and save another patient on the same day. 48 hours after the transplant, the renal function of this new transplanted patient was normal.
Not always possible, kidney transplantation is the only end-stage treatment that allows all functions of the kidney to be carried out normally – it eliminates what you drink and eat and also controls blood pressure – and which improves the patient’s life expectancy and quality of life.
It is currently the most practiced transplant in France with some 3,500 kidney transplants each year.
15,000 French people awaiting transplant
Nearly half of kidney transplants are initiated because of diabetes, this disease is therefore on the way to becoming the main cause of this heavy intervention.
In France, removal from living patients (which leads to better results than from a deceased patient) concerns between 10% and 12% of kidney transplants, which is rather low when the needs are real: there are approximately 15,000 French people in waiting for a kidney transplant.
In Norway, for example, 40% to 50% of grafts are taken from living donors.
Live normally with only one kidney
In France, a living, voluntary and healthy adult can donate a kidney under the conditions defined by law, according to the bioethics law of July 7, 2011.
Living organ donors can be the father or the mother and, by derogation, a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister of the recipient, his spouse, his grandparents, uncles or aunts, first cousins and first cousins as well than the spouse of the father and the mother.
“The donor can also be any person providing proof of living together for at least two years with the recipient as well as any person who can provide proof of a close and stable emotional bond for at least two years with the recipient.“, according to’Biomedicine Agency.
Transplantation is only possible from a donor with the same or compatible blood group as the recipient.
Professor Gilbert Deray, head of the nephrology department at the Parisian Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, recalled on Europe 1 that a person who has donated a kidney can “live normally”. And he pointed out that “the sample is taken after a very complete health check, the slightest problem detected becomes a contraindication“. And to hammer: “we never put a donor in danger!“