The possible impact of donor and recipient gender and age on renal transplantation

Abstract EN

It has been noted for a considerable time that kidney transplants belter in female than in male recipients.

The observation of worse functional prognosis of female grafts is of interest in view of the fact that the renal prognosis in primary chronic renal disease is considerably better in female patients, as documented by experimental and clinical observations.

This has been ascribed to a protective effect of estrogens.

An intriguing hypothesis has been offered to account for the effect of donor gender on renal allograft outcome, i.e., they postulate that female kidneys contain fewer nephrons (nephron underdosing), thereby increasing the workload of the individual nephrons.

In a preliminary study to determine the effect of donor, recipient gender on the incidences of acute rejection episodes, we studied the correlation between donor-recipient gender and one-year graft out come in 87 cadaveric kidney transplant recipients.

Our analysis showed that higher episodes of graft rejection were documented when kidneys of female donor were transplanted into male recipients compared with kidneys from male donors transplanted into female or male recipients.

The same dependency of graft survival on the gender was even observed in relation to donor and recipient age.

Higher episodes of graft rejection was documented when the kidney transplanted to old recipient from old donor (50 yr).