AFRICAN AMERICANS LEAST LIKELY TO RECEIVE A LIVING KIDNEY

Renal Business Today
NEW YORK—At every transplant center in the nation, African Americans are the least likely to receive a kidney from a living organ donor, according to findings published in the June issue of the American Journal of Kidney Diseases, the official journal of the National Kidney Foundation (NKF).

The study, based on data gathered from all 275 transplant centers in the U.S., also showed that those facilities serving predominantly African American populations had even higher rates of living donor transplant disparities.

“We were quite disappointed to find that not a single center in this country had equal attainment of live donor kidney transplants in African Americans and non-African Americans,” said the study’s lead author, Dorry Segev, MD, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “We were hoping to find at least a few centers where there as racial parity, so we could learn best practices. We were surprised to find that those centers that treated the highest percentage of African Americans actually had the highest racial disparities.”

At transplant centers with the highest disparities pertaining to living organ donation, African Americans had 76 percent lower odds of obtaining a kidney from a living donor. Even at the facilities that came closest to equality, African Americans were still 35 percent less likely to obtain a transplant from a living donor.

There are more than 92,000 people waiting for a kidney in the United States, and over a third of those are African Americans. In 2011, there were 5,771 living donor transplants performed -- the lowest rate in 10 years—but only 813 of those kidneys were received by African Americans.

Story source: http://www.renalbusiness.com/news/2012/06/african-americans-least-likely-to-receive-a-living-kidney-donation.aspx

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