Unlike diamonds, kidneys don't last forever
With all of the talk about kidney transplants in recent days, one thing has been left unsaid: Many kidney transplants don't last forever.
About 50 percent of kidney transplants from live donors are still working at 20 years, which means many people will need repeat transplants. With more transplants being done than ever before, and being done so successfully, the number of repeat transplants has been on the rise in recent years.
I wrote this story last year. In talking with some pediatric nephrologists (kidney docs), they mentioned something I never knew, that kidney transplants, especially in younger people, are a wonderful long-term fix but not necessarily a permanent one. And that's not always because patients may reject a new kidney or get some other severe illness.
"We can't get the grafts to last forever," Dr. Alicia M. Neu, a pediatric nephrologist at Johns Hopkins Children's Center, told me at the time. "We've kind of hit a wall. People live with one kidney all the time. They donate one, and they're fine. ...
The most interesting factoid (one of the best I have come across since I started covering medicine): When patients need a new kidney, surgeons typically don't remove the malfunctioning ones. They stay where they are and just shrivel up. One women quoted in the story had 6 kidneys, several of them implanted in her pelvic region. There is a limit: Doctors had told her there wouldn't be room for anymore if this last kidney stopped working.
Photo courtesy of ABC
