Kidney Transplant Outcomes in Alport Patients Similar or Better than Other Renal Diseases

Patients with Alport syndrome who undergo kidney transplants due to end-stage kidney disease have similar patient and graft survival rates as other patients with end-stage renal disease, according to researchers.

The findings also suggest that early diagnosis and management can have a favorable long-term outcome for Alport syndrome patients.

The study, “Outcomes of kidney transplantation in Alport syndrome compared with other forms of renal disease” was published in the medical journal Renal Failure.

A team of researchers led by Dr. Mohammed Kaballo of the Department of Nephrology, University Hospital Limerick in Ireland studied patients who underwent kidney transplants over the last 33 years, using the Irish Renal Transplant Registry.

They divided the patients into two groups based on whether they had Alport syndrome. They then assessed the survival of the graft, or transplanted kidney, and the overall survival of the patients.

Between 1982 and 2014, there were 51 patients diagnosed with Alport syndrome who received a kidney transplant in Beaumont Hospital Dublin, where the study was based. In that same period, there were 3,430 patients who did not have a diagnosis of Alport syndrome who also received a kidney transplant.

The results showed that approximately 70 percent of patients with Alport syndrome who received a kidney transplant survived for 20 years or more, compared to almost 45 percent for patients with other kidney diseases.

According to the authors, several factors were associated with patient survival, including the age of the recipient at the time of the transplant, sex, and the age of the donor.

The 20-year survival rate of the transplanted tissue was almost 47 percent for patients with Alport syndrome and a little more than 30 percent for patients with other kidney diseases.

Previous research had shown that patients with Alport syndrome who undergo kidney transplants have similar or better patient and graft survival rates than patients with other kidney diseases. This study confirms these findings.

In the future, researchers are planning to genetically analyze the patients to examine the inheritance patterns of Alport syndrome in Ireland. This would allow them to assess whether it would be beneficial to use genetic diagnosis to predict and manage the disease among the patients’ relatives.