Kidney Transplantation in the Elderly

There is an increase in the older incident end-stage renal disease population that is associated with an increasing prevalence of end-stage renal disease in the United States. This trend is paralleled by an increasing rate of kidney transplantation in the elderly. Although patient survival is lower in older versus younger kidney recipients, the elderly benefit from a reduction in mortality rate and improved quality of life with transplantation compared with dialysis. Immunologic, physiologic, and psychosocial factors influence transplant outcomes and should be recognized in the care of the elderly transplant patient. In this review, we discuss transplantation in the elderly patient, particularly the topics of access to transplantation, patient and graft survival, the impact of donor quality on transplant outcomes, immunology and immunosuppression of aging, and ethical considerations in the development of an equitable organ allocation scheme.