Background: Kidney paired donation (KPD) is a rapidly growing modality for facilitating living donor kidney transplantation (LDKTx) for patients who are incompatible with their healthy, willing and living donor. The impact of donor-recipient age difference on long and short-term graft and patient survivals in LDKTx is still uncertain.
Methods: A total of 1502 LDKTx recipients who received regular follow-up in our center from 1999 to 2012 were studied. Donor-recipient age difference was divided into subgroups (donor-recipient 0-10, 11-20, 0-20, 21-30, 31-40, and 21-40 years). Outcome measures included death censored graft, patient survival and acute rejection rate.
Results: The 1-, 5-, 10-year patient survival of the donor-recipient age difference ≤20 years group showed no difference compared with the age difference >20 years group (94.5%, 83.2%, 71.9% and 95.2%, 86%, 77.8%, p = 0.053). The 1-, 5-, 10-year graft survival of the donor-recipient age difference ≤20 years group showed no difference compared with the age difference >20 years group (94.6%, 81.6%, 72.1% and 94%, 80%, 72.2%, p = 0.989). The rejection were also similar (17.5% vs. 16.5%, p > 0.05). There was no statistically significant difference in graft survival and acute rejection rate in all subgroups.
Conclusions: Older donors (usually within families) are not associated with worse outcome is reassuring. KPD should not be prohibited due to high donor-recipient age difference, when size of donor pool is small as in single center KPD program.