Organ Exchange will provide more kidneys - Aftonbladet

If you have no suitable donor for a kidney transplant may have to wait up to three years.

A new exchange system will reduce the waiting time.

– This way you can do two transplants that previously could not do any at all, says Lars Wennberg, Chief of Transplantation Clinic at Karolinska University Hospital, to echo.

To a person who needs a new kidney from a person who wants to donate one, for example, in a couple or between family members, are required to tissue types match well enough. Otherwise there will be no transplantation and the sick person ends up in the donation queue, which can mean a wait of between two and three years.

Now the man in Sweden to introduce a system that is proven to lead to more kidney transplants in other countries. You want to match potential donors and recipients throughout Sweden, in the same way as it currently operates when an organ becomes available from a person who is dead.

– Let’s say you have a pair in Stockholm where someone To donate a kidney to another, but they do not match the immunological reasons. It may be that there is a corresponding pair of such Gothenburg who do not fit together, but they can fit crosswise with each other so that a kidney from Stockholm can be transplanted in Gothenburg and vice versa. This way you can do two transplants that previously could not do any at all, says Lars Wennberg to echo.

Idea of ​​Nobel laureates

Wennberg believe that the transplants will increase as that amassed more couples in the system.

– In other countries where you do this, it’s around ten percent of the transplants with living donors made as a result of this kind of renal replacement programs, says Lars Wennberg .

The exchange program is the brainchild of the American Nobel laureate in economics, Alvin E. Roth, and has so far been tested in the USA and the UK.

In Sweden, cooperation will take place between the hospitals that perform transplants of kidneys, ie in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö and Uppsala.

The project is already underway and we hope that in 2015 implementing the first exchange. In the future it may also be necessary to work the same way in Scandinavia.