Kidney Donation: How Do You Match Up?

The Huffington Post | Leslie Spry, MD

April is National Donate Life Month, and if you're thinking about donating a kidney, now would be the time to find out what it's all about. Did you ever wonder how they match potential organ donors with people who need organs? There are more than 92,000 people in the United States who are waiting for a kidney transplant. More than 114,000 people are waiting for a lifesaving organ transplant of some kind. More than 16,000 kidney transplants were done last year and more than 5,000 of them were from live donors.

So what's the secret to the perfect match? I'll answer that question with a few more questions.

What's Your Type? We first need to know your blood type. The blood types are O, A, B, and AB. Certain blood types can only be matched to other blood types in a specific way. Blood type O is a universal donor who can donate to any person on the list. If you are the kidney recipient with blood type O, then you can receive a kidney from another blood type O donor. If you have blood type A, your donor must be blood type O or A. If you are blood type B, your donor must be blood type O or B. If you are blood type AB, your donor could be blood type AB or O. Blood type O is the most common blood type and blood type A is the second most common.

Is there a mismatch? An antigen is a protein that acts to label and to identify some unique aspect of every cell in your body. Every cell in the body has antigens that are unique to that person. The human leukocyte antigens (HLAs) are unique sets of proteins that identify each person as a unique individual to the immune system. Your immune system must search out foreign material, such as bacteria and viruses, and be able to distinguish these foreign "invaders" from your own cells. Antigens help your body to catalog what's foreign by providing a unique immunological "fingerprint" of your identity. So, in order to allow organ donation, it is important to try to match at least some of these HLAs to lessen the impact of your body perceiving the new organ as an invader.
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leslie-spry-md-facp/kidney-donation_b_1448762.html

{Register to be an organ,eye and tissue donor. To learn how, www.donatelife.net or www.organdonor.gov}