Efforts underway to better track long-term health of kidney donors

Washington DC — The big unknown when someone donates a kidney: The long-term health consequences.

Now the U.S. is taking a step toward finally tracking how living donors fare over decades — just as candidates are getting some new cautions to consider.

Specialists insist the surgery seldom brings serious complications for the donor.

What happens later in life is less certain.

British researchers reported Monday that living kidney donors are more likely to develop later kidney failure than non-donors — and female donors may experience a pregnancy complication, problematic high blood pressure.

Overall, the chances of trouble still are pretty low, according to the analysis of international donor studies published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

But there hasn’t been enough research to advise donor candidates — especially younger ones — about who’s really most at risk and if there are protective steps they could take.

“For those of us who counsel potential donors, there is reason for pessimism that we will soon be able to estimate individual risk with any precision,” Drs. Peter Reese of the University of Pennsylvania and Emilio Poggio of the Cleveland Clinic wrote in an accompanying editorial.

Until there’s better information, it might be safer to accept donations from middle-aged donors than younger ones, the duo proposed.

For example, the best studies of how the remaining kidney functions have tracked donors for eight to 15 years, which “should not be particularly reassuring when advising a 25-year-old donor,” they wrote.