Swap Kidney Transplant - Things You Need To Know About It!

Kidney failure is an acute health problem, which leads to either treatment through transplanting a new healthy kidney. Still less than 10% of those, who suffer from kidney failure, undergo a kidney transplant with the help of a family donor and around 1% of the patients do so with the kidney of a deceased donor. The remaining candidates, who need to undergo treatment for kidney failure, go for dialysis as they cannot find a family donor or any deceased donor.

There are even hurdles faced by kidney failure patients, wherein they are unable to go ahead with the treatment as the blood group of the prospective donor does not match with the patient. This is when Swap Kidney Transplant becomes an ideal for them.

What Is Swap Kidney Transplant?
Swap Kidney Transplant or Kidney Exchange is simply a barter system, where a give and take policy takes place between two pairs of people.

Some important points include:

1. Each pair consists of a giver and a taker and both the pairs benefit by receiving an organ that gets matched completely.
2. This barter framework gives the opportunity to maximise returns in an exponential manner where there is a large pool and complicated algorithms in order to get the kidneys exchanged, are built into it.
3. Swap pair consists of a patient, who is the receiver and a donor, who can be a family member.
4. These kinds of pairs are such that organs cannot get exchanged between one another in an ordinary manner, due to incompatibility of blood groups or tissues.

How does the treatment actually takes place?
Swap Kidney Transplant is a process where exchange of organs takes place between two families, who are not able to donate the organ to their own family member as there is a blood group mismatch. Hence, this method involves sharing of organs between pair of donor and recipient who are not related. By doing a swap, where the two patients could not have undergone kidney transplant because of blood group mismatch, they can now easily go ahead with their kidney transplantation. In case you have a concern or query you can always consult an expert & get answers to your questions!