Life lease: it is safe for recovered Covid patients to donate kidneys

NEW DELHI: People who have recovered from the coronavirus can safely donate their kidneys, according to the results of a multicenter study based on 31 transplant cases. Transplant surgeries were conducted after the first wave of the pandemic between July and September of last year. All the donors were those with a mild infection.

The study was prompted by the unavailability of the literature on kidney transplants in case the donor is someone who has recovered from COVID-19, said Dr Sanjiv Gulati, director of nephrology, Fortis Hospital. , Vasant Kunj.

Gulati, who is one of the study’s authors, said there was a huge shortage of kidney donors.

He said: “This is because there are smaller families these days and in many cases diabetes is familial. Then there is the added fear of the coronavirus. What can we do if the people who have recovered from the coronavirus are donors? ”

Gulati said there was a fear that in the event that the person donating the kidney is someone who has recovered from COVID-19, a low degree of coronavirus could be transferred to the recipient during the transplant process. .

Recipients are given immunosuppressants to reduce their immunity during the transplant process, making them vulnerable to infections, he added.

“Around the world, kidney transplants were stopped when the coronavirus pandemic began. Later, we started to follow the standard operating procedure for kidney transplants which included twice donor screening for Covid, ”said Gulati.

“We looked at other infectious diseases. The most common infection that is similar to the coronavirus is influenza. We looked at the duration of the coronavirus infection. In the recovered donors, we performed two RT-PCR tests in a month to see if they were completely free from the infection, ”he said.

The donors were also screened for residual damage to their other organs from the coronavirus before being operated on.

“We did their echocardiogram, HRCT and ultrasound to make sure they had fully recovered,” Gulati said.

“The patients had a six-month follow-up and we saw that the recipients did not develop COVID-19 after the surgeries,” he said.

The study was published in a medical journal, Transplantation, he said.