Can Older Adults Safely Donate Kidneys?

By Jane Farrell

With increasing organ demand, living kidney donation from older donors has become more common. A new Clinical Transplantation study indicates that kidney donation among carefully-selected adults over 60 years of age poses minimal perioperative risks and no added risk of long-term kidney failure.

A combination of an aging population and an overwhelming kidney transplant waitlist will necessarily compel transplant centers into accepting more older donors as a way to expand the donor pool, according to a news release from Wiley, the journal’s publisher.

“What this study demonstrates is that carefully-selected older kidney donors are at no higher risk, short-term or long-term, than their younger counterparts,” said lead author Dr. Oscar Serrano, of the University of Minnesota. “This finding has the potential to expand the donor pool by making accessible a whole segment of the population that previously was perceived high-risk for donation.”