Monday, May 14, 2018

Kidney Exchange in India: current conditions and recommendations for the future

The Indian Society of Organ Transplantation has published guidelines for expanding kidney exchange in India:

Kute VB, Agarwal SK, Sahay M, Kumar A, Rathi M, Prasad N, Sharma RK, Gupta KL, Shroff S, Saxena SK, Shah PR, Modi PR, Billa V, Tripathi LK, Raju S, Bhadauria DS, Jeloka TK, Agarwal D, Krishna A, Perumalla R, Jain M, Guleria S, Rees MA. Kidney-paired donation to increase living donor kidney transplantation in India: Guidelines of Indian Society of Organ Transplantation – 2017. Indian J Nephrol 2018;28:1-9

Here's the summary of their recommendations:

"Evidence-based recommendations, suggestions, and expert consensus statements in this document aim to expand KPD and may serve as a model for other developing countries. For these guidelines, all reference articles in the English literature related to KPD transplantation in India from MEDLINE (PubMed from 2000 to 2017) database were included and reviewed.

We recommend that each potential DRP should be educated, encouraged, and counseled about KPD transplant in an easy-to-understand format as early as possible in the process of chronic kidney disease (CKD) care.

We recommend that all the transplant team members including transplant coordinator in addition to other regular training should also be trained for counseling about risk, benefits of KPD, nonexchange options, consent process, financial screening of DRP, data entry-related issues of KPD, and overall support for KPD.

We recommend that a standard written informed consent should be obtained from each DRP. We suggest that DRP should be given information about expected waiting time before transplantation, and every attempt should be made to reduce waiting time, particularly for hard-to-match pairs with the innovative ways in KPD matching.

We suggest that easy-to-match pairs (A donor and B recipient and vice versa) and sensitized pairs should be encouraged for KPD over ABO-incompatible kidney transplantation (ABOiKT) and desensitization protocol.

We recommend that all types of KPD should be practiced only after legal permission as per the existing transplant law.

We suggest that three-way exchange has optimum quality and quantity of matching.

We suggest that potential KPD transplant centers should study the key elements of success of other successful KPD program.

We suggest that computerized algorithms should be encouraged over manual allocation.

We recommend that all patients should be screened for pretransplant immunological risk, occult infections, and other risk factors to prevent and reduce posttransplant unequal outcome due to patient-related factors.

We suggest that the age difference between KPD donors should not be the key issue in allocation and better immunological match may counteract the effect of higher donor–recipient age difference.

We recommend that participating transplant teams should make the decision by consensus about kidney donor travel versus kidney transport as per local resources and logistics, though donor travel rather than kidney transport is likely to be simple.

We suggest that transplant surgery should be performed at the place where patient is evaluated, admitted, and willing to do posttransplant follow-up and simultaneous rather than sequential surgery should be preferred.

We recommend that the formation of KPD registry is one of the principal strategies to improve the quality of matching and number of KPD.

We suggest that DRP needs to be cognizant of transcultural, language, and legal barriers in national program when patients and their donors may belong to different regions or states of India."


And here's the introductory summary of the background in India:

The Indian CKD registry in 2010 reported that at the time of enrolment in registry, 61% of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients were not on any form of renal replacement therapy (RRT), while 32% were on hemodialysis, 5% on peritoneal dialysis, and only 2% were being worked up for kidney transplantation.[1] There is a gross disparity between supply and demand of the transplant organs across the world, including India. All efforts are to be made to increase the supply of quality organs to the waiting transplant recipients. KPD is one such process for increasing supply of organs to patients waiting for transplant. ABO-compatible living donor kidney transplant (LDKT) is the ideal and cost-effective RRT modality for ESRD patients in resource-limited developing country such as India, where morbidity and mortality on long-term dialysis is unacceptably high. Access to RRT is mainly prevented by paucity of facilities and affordability. Up to 80% of kidney donors are living donors, while DDKT programs are still evolving in most parts of India.

KPD transplant enables two incompatible DRP to receive more compatible kidneys. In this, a living kidney donor who is otherwise incompatible with the recipient exchanges kidneys with another DRP. KPD can be performed at any transplant center that is doing kidney transplantation without the need of extra facilities as required for ABOiKT and transplant with desensitization protocol.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Interesting Post. Keep Sharing.
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