Life
Time for kidney transplant, treatment longer for African Americans – Study
(Reuters Health) – Kidney disease patients who are African American or lack private health insurance are less likely to get matched up with a donor organ before needing to go on dialysis, a new study suggests.
Still, researchers said, as long as patients get a kidney transplant within a year or so of starting dialysis, any extra benefit of a pre-dialysis transplant may be low.
“It’s a possible benefit, but it’s not entirely clear,” said Dr. Morgan Grams, who led the new study at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.
The findings, she said, represent “just another disparity” for African American patients, in particular, who take longer to get on the wait list for a donor kidney and are less likely to get one at all.
“Studies over the last 10 to 15 years have consistently shown that minorities, especially African Americans have poorer access to transplantation,” said Dr. Douglas Scott Keith, head of the kidney transplant program at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville.
“This article basically shows that it’s persisting, it hasn’t gotten much better,” Keith, who wasn’t involved in the new study, told reporters.
Grams and her colleagues looked at about 122,000 first-time kidney recipients who received their organ from a deceased donor off a transplant list between 1995 and 2011.
