Mayo Clinic kidney transplant specialists have developed a new kidney transplant procedure that could make transplants possible for thousands of people who previously were unlikely to have a successful transplant, according to a February 8 statement by the Mayo Clinic.
The Mayo Clinic is one of three medical centers in the United States that offers these positive crossmatch transplants. The procedure greatly reduces the chance of organ rejection in patients with elevated antibody levels, a condition that once made tissue rejection almost certain, the Mayo Clinic said.
About 7000 of the 45,000 people in the United States waiting for a cadaver kidney are affected by this elevated antibody level, the cause of which is unknown. The only option for patients was to stay on dialysis.
The positive crossmatch process is similar to the process used for ABO-incompatible living-donor kidney transplants--another recent advancement in transplants--where patients can receive kidneys from living donors with blood types different from their own, the Mayo Clinic said.
"With positive crossmatch transplants, we are taking it a step further, making it possible for the patients to accept different tissue types in addition to different blood types," said Mark Stegall, MD, a Mayo Clinic kidney and pancreas transplantation surgeon.
So far, Mayo Clinic surgeons have performed 20 ABO-incompatible kidney transplants and four positive crossmatch kidney transplants, and the results and recovery time for both have been similar to that of other living-donor kidney transplants, according to the Mayo Clinic.
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The Mayo Clinic’s statement is posted at www.mayo.edu/comm/mcr/news/news_1488.html.
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