Do Living Kidney Donors Have CKD?

Living kidney donor transplantation is an increasingly used treatment for end-stage renal disease because it both confers excellent outcomes to transplant recipients, and is considered a safe procedure for prospective donors. The short- and long-term safety of prospective donors is paramount to the continued success of living donation. Although the initial experience with living kidney donors mostly included the healthiest donors, increasing need for organs and secular trends in the general population have subtly reshaped prevailing suitability criteria for donation. As the practice of living donation evolved over time, our understanding of kidney disease has also changed as we embraced the framework of the K-DOQI guidelines. It is not uncommon for donors to fit into some of the K-DOQI guidelines paradigms of risk and disease; however, whether there is a true biological consequence or whether it is a merely semantic conundrum remains unclear. Regardless, this is an important issue, and therefore future efforts should aim at addressing this matter.