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People living with HIV can safely receive donated kidneys from deceased donors suffering from the virus, according to a major study that comes as the US government moves to expand the practice. This could reduce the wait for organs for everyone, regardless of HIV status.
The new study, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, looked at 198 kidney transplants performed across the United States. The researchers found similar results whether the donated organ came from a person with or without the AIDS virus.
Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services proposed a rule change that would allow these types of kidney and liver transplants outside of research studies. A final rule would apply to both living and deceased donors. If approved, it may come into effect in the coming year.
Study participants were HIV positive, had kidney failure and agreed to receive an organ from an HIV-positive deceased donor or an HIV-negative deceased donor, whichever kidney was available first.
Also Read: Miracles of Kidney Transplant: Benefits, Procedure, Everything You Need to Know for People Suffering from End Stage Kidney Disease
Researchers followed the organ recipients for four years. They compared half of the people who received kidneys from HIV-positive donors with half of the people whose kidneys came from donors without HIV.
Impact of HIV in kidney donation:
Both groups had similar high rates of overall survival and low rates of organ rejection. Virus levels increased in 13 patients in the HIV donor group and four patients in the other group, mostly due to patients who failed to take HIV medications consistently, and in all cases returned to very low or undetectable levels.
“This demonstrates the safety and excellent outcomes we are seeing from these transplants,” said study co-author Dr. Dori Segev of NYU Langone Health.
In 2010, surgeons in South Africa provided the first evidence that the use of HIV-positive donor organs was safe in people with HIV. But the practice was not allowed in the United States until 2013 when, at Segev’s insistence, the government lifted the ban and allowed research studies. First, the studies were with deceased donors. Then in 2019, Segev and others at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore performed the world’s first kidney transplant from a living donor living with HIV to an HIV-positive recipient.
All told, 500 transplants of kidneys and livers obtained from HIV-positive donors have been performed in the US.
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Carrie Foote, a sociology professor at Indiana University in Indianapolis, said that people living with HIV have been actively discouraged from becoming organ donors because of stigma and outdated state laws and policies that restrict organ donation to people living with HIV. Commit crime.
“Not only can we help people who are suffering from this disease, but we free up more organs in the entire organ pool so that people who don’t have HIV can get organs faster,” said Foote, who Is HIV positive and is a registered organ donor. “It’s a win-win for everyone.”
According to the US Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, more than 90,000 people are on the waiting list for a kidney transplant. More than 4,000 people died while waiting for a kidney in 2022.
In an editorial in the journal, Dr. Elmi Muller of Stellenbosch University in South Africa predicted that the new study “will have far-reaching implications in many countries that do not perform transplants with these organs.”
Muller, the originator of the practice, wrote, “Most of all, we have taken another step toward fairness and equality for persons living with HIV.”
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