Incidence of complications and outcome in live kidney transplant recipients at 1 year—a single center experience

Introduction

Patients with end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) need ongoing dialysis treatments or a kidney transplant to survive. Kidney transplantation is the optimal treatment for patients with ESKD. Advances in surgical, immunosuppressive, and monitoring protocols have led to a significant improvement in short-term kidney allograft survival. However, in order to avoid rejection, kidney transplant patients have to be on immunosuppression which increases the risk of infections, malignancies, cardiovascular diseases, and many other complications. So a balance has to be struck to prevent under or over-immunosuppression.

In this study, we present our experience and follow-up data of kidney transplantations done at our center with special emphasis on the incidence of complications and outcomes in recipients at 1 year.

Aims and objectives

1. To estimate the incidence of post-transplant complications in live kidney transplant recipients at 1 year.

2. To assess the patient and graft survival at 1 year in live kidney transplant recipients.

Materials and methods

This observational study was done in the Department of Nephrology, Sher-I-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, Srinagar, J&K. Patients who underwent transplant at our center from April 2022 to April 2023 were included and each patient was followed up for 1 year in this study. All the consenting kidney transplant recipients undergoing kidney transplantation at our center during the study period were included.

Results

A total of 45 kidney transplants were included in the study. The mean age of our study population was 31.2 years (SD 10.5). 77.5% of our recipient population comprised of men and 22.5% were women. The mean dialysis vintage was 15.1 months (SD 9.4). The incidence of biopsy-proven acute rejection was 15% while 1 year patient and graft survival were 100% and 95%, respectively. The incidence of BK virus-associated nephropathy was 10%. The overall incidence of other infections was 37.5%. The incidence of hypertension and post-transplant diabetes was 65% and 15%, respectively. The incidence of anemia and erythrocytosis was 12.5% and 22.5%, respectively.

Conclusion

Kidney transplant is the treatment of choice for ESKD. However, these patients are at risk of infectious, malignant, cardiometabolic, and other complications. Heightened awareness and surveillance is of utmost importance in these patients.