You want to donate a kidney to someone you love, but you are not a match. What do you do? This month, four Yale surgeons participated in a kidney swap that involved two families at Yale-New Haven Hospital (YNHH).
The Yale-New Haven Organ Transplantation Center has taken a leading role in New England in using kidney swaps to provide alternatives for patients who might otherwise wait years for a life-saving kidney donation. The swaps are made possible by a national database that attempts to match kidney donors with incompatible recipients to reciprocal pairs in an effort to allow more patients to receive living donor transplants. Yale patients who choose to participate can put their name on both regional and national lists.
There are more than 110,000 people in the United States waiting for a kidney transplant, including almost 75,000 active cases (patients who are healthy enough to actually undergo a transplant).
Participating in the recent kidney swap at YNHH were Yale surgeons Sanjay Kulkarni, Manuel Rodriguez-Davolos, Peter Schulam, and Peter Yoo.