University of Maryland Medical Center Recruits Friends, Family To Cut Kidney Transplant Wait Time For African Americans

Surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center have nearly halved the time African-American patients wait for kidney transplants in part by encouraging friends and family members to become living donors, the Baltimore Sun reports. African-Americans nationwide wait an average of 1,335 days for a kidney transplant, but black patients at the Baltimore-based hospital wait an average of 681 days, according to the hospital's review of statistics from the United Network for Organ Sharing. Blacks, however, still wait longer for kidney transplants than other patients. Nationally, other patients wait an average of 734 days for a kidney; at UM Medical Center, the wait is an average of 391 days. Although blacks can receive kidneys from donors of all races, suitable donors are more likely to come from the same race. Donors and patients are matched not only by blood type but by "surface antigens," or proteins on the surface of cells that tend to "run within" ethnic groups. Finding African-American donors has been difficult in part because many blacks distrust the medical system, the Sun reports. Speaking at an American Surgical Association conference on April 25, Dr. Clarence Foster, a transplant surgeon at UM Medical Center, said, "The African-American community is not often aware that they can be living donors. We're willing to go out and seek potential donors in their own families." Doctors at the hospital also have expanded the donor pool by accepting transplants from cadavers with hepatitis C. Although such organs previously were not accepted, doctors have discovered that they do not harm patients who already have hepatitis C. Doctors, however, will not accept an organ from a living donor who has hepatitis C because losing a kidney could harm that individual's health (Bor, Baltimore Sun, 4/26).