Kidney transplant Urgent & life-giving

Kidney transplantation: Donations urgently needed.

(24.08.2010) The decision of Frank Walter Steinmeier (SPD) to donate a kidney to his wife is widely recognized throughout the Federal Republic of Germany and puts the subject of kidney transplantation into the focus of public debate. Around 12,000 people in Germany are currently waiting for a donor kidney, but only just under 2,500 kidneys are transplanted annually.

The two kidneys serve to regulate the water and electrolyte balance of the human body and play important roles in hormone and blood formation. If both organs fail, this situation is life threatening. So is the body z. B. no longer able to spill potassium, which can lead to ventricular fibrillation with fatal consequences. About one in every 1,000th German citizen suffers from kidney failure today, said the medical director of the Berlin Charité, Ulrich Frei, although transplantation is not always necessary. According to the transplant coordinator of the Charité, Thomas Mehlitz, z. As vascular or autoimmune diseases and diabetes mellitus or cysts.

Of the approximately 2,500 kidney transplants performed every year, only a very small proportion is accounted for by living donations. A healthy person is easily able to do without one of his two kidneys. The remaining kidney in most cases easily handles the functions of the removed organ without affecting the daily life of the donor. Only about one percent of donors become ill as a result of the operation. At the Berlin Charité, on average, only one in five transplanted kidneys was a live donation since 1998, the remaining organs came from the deceased. By comparison, in the UK about 25 percent were living donations, in the US about 35 percent and in Scandinavia even more than 50 percent ...

For the affected patients an unpleasant statistic, because they wait „on average, two to seven years on a new kidney“, so kidney specialist Frei and this time span could be shortened considerably, if more humans could still decide during lifetime for a kidney donation. By a donor kidney the patient would save the ongoing dialysis (machine blood purification) and „patients were given more quality of life and a longer survival perspective“, explained Thomas Mehlitz.

The donation of organs is clearly regulated in the Transplantation Act, with donors being first and second-degree relatives, as well as life partners. Through the personal relationship between the donor and the recipient, the legislator wants to ensure transparency and prevent people from being forced to donate or because of the financial incentives to develop a lively organ trade. So before the living donation, a conversation with the living donation commission is absolutely necessary, because here again the voluntary nature of the donation should be checked. In principle, anyone who is healthy and has two fully functional kidneys is a living donor. According to the experts, matches in tissue and blood group are advantageous, but not essential. Incompatible organs have also been transplanted, and the risk that the body rejects them is considerably higher. According to Munich's Großhadern Hospital, most of the living donations come from parents (35 percent) and spouses (33 percent). About 18 percent of the living donations come from siblings, nine percent from close friends and five percent from distant relatives.

A living donation has, according to the comments of Thomas Mehlitz to further considerable advantages, since the quality of the organs is usually better than those of the deceased. In addition, the transplantation takes place under planned conditions, so that the organ can be implanted again directly after removal, explained the expert further. Thus, the lifespan of living donations to the organs of the deceased is considerably increased. Living donations of kidneys last about 15 to 20 years on average, whereas the kidneys of a deceased person only last ten to twelve years.

Kidney transplantation is one of the longest explored organ transplants ever practiced. In 1902, for example, a Viennese doctor carried out the first kidney transplant on a dog and in 1966 the first kidney was transplanted into Germany. During transplantation, the kidney is removed from the donor in about one and a half hours of surgery, rinsed in a preservative solution at four degrees, and then refrigerated until implantation. In the following operation, the donor organ is implanted directly into the abdominal area, with the diseased kidney also remaining in the body. (Fp)

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