Nefrología : publicación oficial de la Sociedad Española Nefrologia
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Practice Guideline
[Present situaltion of living-donor kidney transplantation in Spain and other countries: past, present and future of an excellent therapeutic option].
Kidney transplantation from living donor is an established treatment in Spain since the 60s but has maintained a low level of activity until 2000, when the number of procedures and hospitals that perform this therapy experienced a gradual increase, reaching the highest figure in our history in 2009, with 235 living donor kidney transplants (which represents 10% of renal transplant activity). The reasons why living donor kidney transplantation is emerging in our country are diverse and can be focused in four main areas. 1) Better outcomes obtained when using living donors for kidney transplantation than those obtained with kidneys from deceased donors. Younger recipients with better HLA matching, the good health of the donor, the absence of any damages that occur in the kidney secondary to brain death, the small ischemic time and the possibility of preemptive transplantation can explain the best graft and patient survival. 2) The scarcity of sources: the relaxation of entry criteria on the waiting list implies an increasing challenge of the demand for transplant without the contribution of living donor kidney transplantation, especially in young recipients where the chances of obtaining an age-appropriate deceased donor are lower, due to the change in the profile of the deceased donor (increasingly older). 3) Improvement in the safety of the donor: the excellent evaluation and monitoring of donors (based on international standards) plus the use of less invasive surgical techniques are related to a low complication rate and to survival expectancies of living donors being similar to those of the general population. 4) Barriers overcome: The training effort by the transplant teams, hospital and regional coordinations, and the National Transplant Organization is giving excellent results, visible in the gradual increase in the number of hospitals with a program of living donor kidney transplantation and its activity. In addition, desensitization programs and the national cross-over kidney transplantation program have removed barriers to transplantation in cases of ABO incompatibility or positive crossmatch.
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Goodpasture's syndrome is a rare autoimmune disorder characterized by rapidly progressive glomerulonephritis (RPGN) and alveolar hemorrhage in the presence of antiglomerular basement membrane (anti-GBM) antibodies. Central nervous system involvement is highly unusual in the absence of anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies. ⋯ After treatment with immunosuppressants and plasmapheresis, the patient showed reduced anti-GBM antibody titers and improved neurologic and respiratory symptoms, but renal failure persisted, requiring hemodialysis. Twenty months later, with the disease in remission, he underwent deceased-donor renal transplantation.
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Living donor kidney transplantation is considered an established treatment for end-stage renal failure and is accepted in different transplant forums, nationally and internationally, while ensuring the safety of the donation, the information, the motivation and caring, the free consent and the absence profit. ⋯ it is important to make a good psychosocial assessment to identify whether the motivation is altruistic or not and, in other terms, to detect any kind of coercion (ex, in the family). Living donation must not be offered in desperate family situations so it is important to assess family relationships to rule out the absence of freedom in donor's choice.The Role of Health Care Ethics Committees: there exists a normative in our country that regulates living donation and establishes that the hospital ethics committees should participate in the process of living donation in all cases. Their job is to assess the process and develop a report on the donor free consent to donation. The responsible person of the living transplant program should provide the documentation necessary to the committee. An interview with the potential donor can be required in some cases.
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Letter Case Reports
[Difficult-to-treat atrial fibrillation in a patient on haemodialysis].