Donating a kidney has never been safer, yet the Hong Kong donation rate remains low

By using keyhole surgery, kidney donation mortality has dropped to below 1 in 10,000, and recovery times are much shorter, a new study shows

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A kidney donor’s risk of dying as a result of surgery to remove the organ has reached a new low of less than one in 10,000, and the remaining kidney grows to meet the body’s needs, experts say. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 4:15pm, 3 Sep 2024

People with defective organs or who have survived car accidents often depend on the nobility and kindness of loved ones and strangers for blood and organs.

For donors of kidneys, there was always the worry that the remaining kidney could fail or that the extraction operation could go awry.

But the risk of death from having a kidney removed for transplanting has halved in a decade, and is far below what it was in the 1990s, according to research published by the American Medical Association and carried out by a team led by researchers at NYU Langone Health in New York.

“By 2022, fewer than one death occurred for every 10,000 donations,” the team found, after assessing three decades’ worth of medical records for almost 165,000 people.

Mortality among kidney donors is extremely rare, said Allan Massie, director of the Centre for Surgical and Transplant Applied Research Quantitative Core at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Photo: NYU Grossman School of Medicine

“Our findings suggest that mortality among donors is extremely rare, and the procedure is safer than ever before,” said Allan Massie, director of the Centre for Surgical and Transplant Applied Research Quantitative Core at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Male kidney donors with a history of high blood pressure face the highest risk.

The procedure leaves less of a mark than it used to.