Paired Donation

[JustAPyper]

Why don't more people try to find a donor through paired donation?  When I read about people who are looking for a donor the articles never seem to mention if they have considered a paired donation program.  The articles usually just say that no one in their immediate family was a match for them.  It seems to me that someone in their family could be a match for someone.

The more people in the paired donation program, the better the chances of more people getting living donors.  I'm a bit biased, of course.

Just wondering.

Oh, and Happy New Years.

[Clark]

Happy New Year! This has been on our advocacy list for a long time, and is a part of the new guidance for informed consent content for new donor candidates. Explaining all the options of the currently available technologies and policies is time consuming and challenging as so many of us set foot on our paths to donation completely ignorant of any details. Going forward from now, if similar ignorance is implied in a media story, something is either wrong with the transplant center's consent education practice, not acceptable, or the donor is unwilling to reveal their refusal to consider paired donation, completely understandable and acceptable. Or the reporter or editor left it out. Regardless, it's reasonable to expect that increasing media mention of paired donation as a reasonable option is likely.

[CK]

When I was being tested, they initially thought that I was fit for donation, but not a match for my husband because he has type O blood and I have type A.  They eventually figured out that I was type A2, which can donate to O...but in the meantime, we figured we'd have to do paired donation.  In our case this would have been difficult, since he needed an O kidney, which in most donors, could just be given straight to their own recipient.  Maybe we would have gotten lucky with a chain started by an altruistic O donor, but who knows? It could have taken quite some time.

Maybe that's part of the issue at times?

[JustAPyper]

I hadn't thought of that.  There are probably many instances where an O donor donates to another blood group because they can and don't need to do a paired exchange donation to get their recipient the same blood group.  I'm type O and I donated to a type O through paired exchange.

[willow123]

In Canada almost all the donations are through a paired program.  I know of one large center that runs its match twice a year. Hundreds of people get matched up but the transplants are often done at other hospitals in the provinces.  The logistics are mind-boggling.  My husband has been matched with countless recipients through the years but his sister and her extremely high antigen count has not matched with anyone.  So sad.

[ohtobeahayes]

It is slowly gaining more and more attention.
I started a kidney chain.
It seems to me that it takes a little while longer because the list is "shorter" so to speak.  Mine was 5 years ago, and the meetings for matching from the paired list was bi weekly ( I think!!!!), while matching meetings from the regular list were far more often. I could be wrong on those timelines as it was a while ago now.
I think with more and more exposure as more paired donations happen, more people will join etc. I'm sure just in the 5 years since ours things have changed drastically.

GO KIDNEY CHAINS!
Nicki

[Karol]

The National Kidney Registry runs its matches daily and are making transplants available for people who otherwise would have waited longer on the national deceased organ transplant list. www.kidneyregistry.org
Hopefully someday we will have an international registry.

[connorsdad1998]

I donated through the kidney exchange 12 days ago, (surgery 69 of the recently completed 70 person chain). I am type O, but my sister in law and I didn't match on so many other levels, that we went into the paired exchange program. We hoped that being type O would bring us greater chances of getting her a kidney. Even with that, she was such a tough match that it took 4 years to get into a chain. Without the chain, we wouldn't have a kidney for her still.

The benefit is that not only did my sister in law get that incredibly hard to find kidney, so did my recipient. She was another one of those waiting for the 1 in a million matches.

This program is fantastic and I have been recommending to anyone who reaches out about needing a donor. More pairs, more matches...