Olympian feat: Doctors smash kidney transplant record

July 9, 8:45 AMSF Health News ExaminerJefferson Adams

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Transplant surgeon Dr. Robert Montgomery fields questions during a news
conference, Tuesday, July 7, 2009 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
Montgomery says he and doctors in three other hospitals have completed
what is believed to be the largest series of kidney paired donation procedures
ever undertaken. (AP Photo/Patrick Smith)

Dr. Robert Montgomery, chief transplant surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital, together with surgeons in four states, pulled off an unprecedented eight-way kidney transplant over a three week period in what doctors describe as the largest such transplant donation chain to date.

Dr. Montgomery believes such intricate, multistate exchanges can drastically reduce the number of patients waiting for eligible donors. The process involves the use of computer modeling to match donors to recipients. If adopted by transplant centers nationwide the model has the potential to greatly expand the pool of available kidney donors and could facilitate 1,500 transplants annually, Montgomery said.

The way such multiple-kidney transplants work is by pooling multiple people who need transplants and whose friends or relatives are willing to donate kidneys but aren't directly compatible.  Each donor is then matched with a transplant candidate whom they don't know, but who is compatible with the donated kidney. A chain of surgeries is then arranged in which the kidneys are transferred from each of the donors to each of the matched recipients. Such chain transplants often rely on a so-called altruistic donor, who is willing to donate a kidney to someone they do not know via the donor database.

In this case, ten surgeons carried out 16 transplants on the eight donors and eight recipients at Hopkins, Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, INTEGRIS Baptist Memorial Center in Oklahoma City and Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

Kidneys from living donors are thought to have twice the life-span of kidneys transplanted from cadavers, Montgomery added.

The previous record for such chain transplants was set in April 2008 Johns Hopkins surgeons transplanted six kidneys simultaneously. Prior to that, the team performed a quintuple transplant in 2006, along with several three-way transplants.