Difficult vascular conditions in kidney transplantation

The new dialytic and medical therapies have improved the survival of uremic patients and their preservation of a efficacious clinical condition so as to warrant suitability for transplantation, even after a long period of dialysis. In addition, today the use of a “marginal donor” and “marginal kidney” are often used to increase the pool of available organs, so that the surgeon must face more technical difficulties than in the past; anomalies of the donor kidney, harvesting and bench surgery damages, as well as vascular pathologies in the recipient. A review of our 151 renal transplantations from January 1999 to May 2003 showed that it was often possible to overcome these technical difficulties yielding good results. This work sought to demonstrate that neither “marginal donor”/“marginal kidney” used to expand donor pool nor recipient vascular pathologies should be considered transplant contraindications. Knowledge of various technical options and the ability to put them rapidly into practice are necessary to use any organ.