Design and Setting Retrospective review at an academic tertiary care referral center. We reviewed 201 consecutive living-donor kidney transplantations performed between January 1988 and June 1997. Intervention Donor nephrectomy and living-donor kidney transplantation. Main Outcome Measures Donor surgical complications, correlation of preoperative imaging of donor vascular anatomy and operative findings, and donor lengths of stay in the hospital were analyzed. The mean donor length of stay in the hospital was 5.0 days but decreased from 6.2 to 4.0 days during the study.
Conclusions Living-donor nephrectomy is associated with low surgical morbidity.
Recent trends include shortened lengths of stay in the hospital, the use of computed tomographic angiography instead of digital subtraction angiography for preoperative imaging of donor vascular anatomy, and an expanded use of unrelated living donors. Presented at the 78th Annual Meeting of the New England Surgical Society, Bolton Landing, NY, September 21, 1997. Mary Ann Simpson, PhD, and Douglas Hale, MD, assisted with data retrieval and statistical analysis. All rights reserved.