Living Kidney Donation
Would you like to donate a healthy kidney
to someone in need of a transplant?
Donating your kidney can vastly improve the quality of life of someone with kidney failure. You could even save a life. People who have kidney failure are encouraged to seek living donors for a kidney transplant because:
- The recipients will bypass the wait for a deceased donor kidney and receive a kidney faster.
- Dialysis takes a toll on one's heart. Receiving a kidney from a living donor can reduce the risk of cardiac complications.
- A living donor's kidney is less likely to be rejected by the recipient’s immune system than a kidney from a deceased donor.
- Recipients of kidneys from living donors have notably higher success rates, shorter hospital stays and require less immunosuppression than those who receive kidneys from deceased donors.
Kidney donation surgery is generally done laparoscopically.
If a person would like to donate their kidney to someone else but they are not compatible, the potential donor and the recipient may choose to be entered in the kidney exchange program, which allows the donor to give to a compatible recipient and another living donor to give to them.
Living Donor Kidney Exchange Program
Willing donors may be excluded from donating to friends or loved ones
because of blood type or cross-match incompatibility. To make the gift
of life possible for more people, Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital
(RWJUH), the state's other transplant centers, and the
New Jersey Organ and Tissue Sharing Network have formed a statewide living donor kidney exchange program.
If the recipient from one pair is compatible with the donor from the other pair, and vice versa, the transplant center may arrange for two (or more) simultaneous transplants to take place. This allows two transplant candidates to receive organs and two donors to give organs even though the original recipient/donor pairs were unable to do so with each other.
In paired exchange, an incompatible donor/recipient pair (such as a mother and son that don’t have compatible blood types) are matched with another incompatible donor/recipient pair for a match.
After thorough evaluation and approval by the transplant team, participating donor and recipient pairs are matched for the exchange. In paired kidney donations, the surgeries take place simultaneously. Donors and recipients remain anonymous unless all parties agree to meet after the transplant surgeries have taken place.
For More Information
To learn more about becoming a living kidney donor:
- Visit the Living Donor Education page.
- Download the full brochure, Living Kidney Donor Education Program -- Evaluation, for details about qualifications and considerations for becoming a living donor at RWJUH.
- Download the brochure, Living Kidney Donor Education Program, for a full overview of the kidney donation process at RWJUH.