WASHINGTON (AP) – Nearly 1 in 3 patients who needs a kidney transplant is especially hard to match, and new research suggests a painstaking treatment to help those patients tolerate an incompatible organ is worth considering.
More hospitals have begun offering so-called desensitization therapy to help high-risk patients who have a willing but non-matching living donor receive an organ their bodies otherwise would reject. Some specialty centers have reported success but it wasn’t clear how well the approach would work when used widely.
Now an analysis from nearly two dozen transplant centers found patients who took that chance had better long-term survival than those who stayed on the waiting list, whether or not they eventually found a match from a deceased donor.
“Desensitization is still not for every transplant center,” said senior author Dr. Dorry Segev of Johns Hopkins University, which helped pioneer incompatible transplants. But the findings show “you don’t need a compatible living donor to make a transplant happen today – you just need a living donor.”
The study is published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.