Living Kidney Donor Follow-up: State-of-the-art and Future Directions

Long-term living kidney donor follow-up has not been considered necessary by many living kidney donor programs because a large number of single-center studies show that living kidney donation is associated with minimal mortality and morbidity. However, some transplant professionals and, more importantly, living donors disagree. To evaluate the need for more data on living kidney donor outcomes, a conference was held in September 2010 (Leichtman and colleagues: Am J Transplant 11: 2561-2568, 2011). Participants were health care professionals, living donors, members of the United Network for Organ Sharing, Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and insurance companies. This article will discuss the status of living donor follow-up in the context of the follow-up conference. It will also provide a slightly different viewpoint of provider responsibility for donor follow-up than that presented by the conference report.