Life
Time for kidney transplant, treatment longer for African Americans – Study
Nine percent of those patients had their kidney transplant before going on dialysis, and another 12 percent received a kidney within their first year on dialysis, the researchers reported Thursday in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
African Americans were 56 percent less likely to receive a kidney before dialysis than whites – possibly because there was a delay in getting them on the transplant list or fewer matching donors, researchers said.
Typically, an available organ goes to the local patient who has been on the kidney transplant list the longest – but that person can be skipped if the organ is a direct match to the immune system of another patient high on the list.
People in the study who had private insurance were also three times more likely to get an early kidney than others.
Insurance is required for a transplant, so anyone who already has private or government-funded insurance can get on the list early. People who aren’t covered initially become eligible for Medicare once their kidney function is bad enough to start dialysis, but not before then.
It’s still unclear whether receiving a kidney very early on improves the long-term outlook for patients with renal disease.
Pre-dialysis recipients and people who got their kidney within a year of starting dialysis were equally likely to survive for years after their transplant, the researchers found. Both did better than late-dialysis recipients.
