Retroperitoneoscopy-Assisted Living Donor Nephrectomy: Recipient's Outcome

Lee, Jong Hoon; Kim, Soon Il; Kim, Yu Seun; Park, Ki Il; Rha, Koon Ho; Yang, Seung Choul; Kim, Hyun Jung; Jeon, Kyung Ock

Abstract

PURPOSE: Laparoscopic living donor nephrectomy has recently been emerged as a very attractive measure to the standard open surgical procedure for kidney transplantation (KTx) because of many advantages. But it also has some disadvantages such as technical difficulty, impaired early graft function and expensiveness. To overcome this shortcomings, we developed a new surgical method of retroperitoneoscopy assisted live donor nephrectomy. The method has been reported as an attractive surgical methods with many advantages to donor. But, recipient`s outcome is also equally important in living donor kidney transplantation.
METHODS
We retrospectively studied recipient`s outcome between patients who received living donor kidneys from conventional open nephrectomies (Group I, n=247) and retroperitoneoscopy assisted nephrectomies (Group II, n=82) at our institution from March 1, 1997 and July 30, 2000. We compared postoperative complication, patient and graft survival and graft function between two groups for 12 months retrospectively.
RESULTS
Demographic data such as age, sex, kidney weight/body weight ratio; ABO compatibility; degree of HLA matching and method of immunosuppression were not different between two groups (p>0.05). Complications, such as delayed graft function, acute rejection, ureter complication, graft failure, patients motality were not different. For the evaluation of graft function, we measured serum creatinine level for 12 months after trasplantation. There also was no difference of graft function between two groups.
CONCLUSION
Recipient's outcome in patient received kidney by retroperitoneoscopy assisted live donor nephrectomy was similar to those of patient received kidney by conventional operation.