People who volunteer to donate a kidney face an even lower risk of death from the operation than doctors have long thought, researchers reported Wednesday. The study tracked 30 years of living kidney donation and found that by 2022, fewer than 1 of every 10,000 donors died within three months of the surgery. Transplant centers have been using older data – citing a risk of 3 deaths per 10,000 living donors – in counseling donors about potentially deadly surgical complications.
“The last decade has become a lot more safe in the operating room for living donors,” said Dr. Dorry Segev, a transplant surgeon at NYU Langone Health. He co-authored the study published in the journal JAMA.
ALSO READ: Could awake kidney transplants become the new standard in surgery? Here's all you need to know Newer surgical techniques are the key reason, said Segev, calling for guideline updates to reflect those safety improvements – and maybe increase interest in living donation. He often finds transplant recipients more worried about potential risks to their donors than the would-be donors themselves. “For them, this is even more reassuring to allow their friends or family to donate on their behalf,” Segev said.
Thousands of people die each year waiting for an organ transplant. It’s possible for living donors to give a one of their two kidneys or part of a liver, the only organ that regenerates. With nearly 90,000 people on the U.
S. list for a kidney transplant , finding a living don.