I want to donate my kidney

Ready to see if you’re qualified to donate your kidney? *Most people can return to normal activities after 2 – 4 weeks. Donors with physically demanding jobs may need 4 – 6 weeks of recovery before returning to work. High-performance athletes will need 6 months to a year before they are back to pre-donation performance levels. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Kidney donation has few long-term risks for generally healthy people. But there are risks. Kidney donation may slightly increase your risk of one day having kidney failure. This is especially true for Black men. But the increase in risk is small. There's a less than 1% chance of future kidney failure after kidney donation. Before you donate a kidney, you need a full medical exam. Your health care provider checks to see if you're a good match for the person who might get the kidney. You'll also be checked to make sure you don't have any health problems that could be made worse by donating a kidney. Kidney donation involves major surgery. Risks of major surgery include bleeding and infection. But most kidney donors recover with few or no problems. After having the surgery to remove a kidney (nephrectomy), you may stay 1 to 2 nights in the hospital. The rest of your recovery is typically completed at home. With time, the kidney you have left gets a little bigger as it takes on extra blood flow and works to filter wastes. The long-term survival rate after kidney donation is about the same as that for generally healthy people who aren't kidney donors. After kidney donation, it's important to have regular health checkups. These include kidney function tests and blood pressure checks. To provide you with the most relevant and helpful information, and understand which information is beneficial, we may combine your email and website usage information with other information we have ...

• • • Toggle Digital Health Services menu options • Toggle Video Visits menu options • • Toggle WCM OnDemand Second Opinion menu options • • • • Toggle Weill Cornell Connect menu options • • • • Toggle Patient Education menu options • • Toggle Health Podcasts menu options • • • • • • Toggle Myra Mahon Patient Resource Center menu options • • • • • • • • Toggle About Us menu options • • • • • • Toggle About Doctors at WCM menu options • • • • Toggle Advancing Patient Care menu options • • • • • Toggle Coronavirus (COVID-19) menu options • • • • • • • • People who are considering becoming a kidney donor must carefully weigh the potential risks and benefits of donating a kidney. Although the surgery itself is often a major component of this decision, other factors such as medical risks, the cosmetic result, and socioeconomic factors also play an important role in the decision-making process, as described in detail in this section. Immediate/Surgical Risks The following is a comprehensive list of complications that may occur surrounding the surgery to donate a kidney: • Pain • Infection (such as pneumonia or wound infection) • Blood clot • Reaction to anesthesia • Death (Worldwide mortality rate for living kidney donors is 0.03% to 0.06%) • Conversion to open nephrectomy • Need for re-operation (such as for bleeding) • Re-admission to hospital • Hernia • Intestinal obstruction • Testicular swelling and discomfort (male donors) Percent of Living Kidney Donors in the US Who Expe...

So you've decided to donate a kidney. Here's what to expect from the donor selection and screening process. Getting Started To be a donor, you should be at least 18 years old. The best candidates don’t have any major illnesses, aren’t overweight, and don’t smoke. You may get the OK as long as you lose weight or agree to quit smoking before the surgery. There are two types of donation: Directed donation. Your kidney goes to a person that you choose. The team at the transplant center where the surgery will happen should walk you through the process. Non-directed donation (also known as altruistic donation). Your kidney goes to a stranger who needs it most. To find out how to get started, contact the transplant center nearest you. Tests and Evaluation Before you can donate, your doctor will do some tests to make sure you and your kidney are healthy. The first thing they’ll do is check your blood. This is especially important in a directed donation to make sure your kidney is a match for the person who will receive it. There are three main blood tests to check for compatibility between donor and recipient: Blood type test. This makes sure your blood type and the recipient's blood type are a good match. Crossmatch test. Doctors mix a sample of your blood with a sample of the recipient's to see how they react. This makes sure they don’t have antibodies that will cause their body to attack your kidney. HLA typing. This looks to see if you and the recipient share certain genetic m...

When it comes to kidney donation, deciding you want to go through with it is actually the easy part. Most Americans couldn’t donate a kidney even if they wanted to, finds a new study presented at the American Society of Nephrology’s Kidney Week conference in Philadelphia. Dr. Anthony Bleyer, professor of internal medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, and his son Anthony Bleyer, Jr., an economics major at Wake Forest University, looked at data from a representative sample of 7,000 U.S. adults from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey survey. They discovered that a full 55% of the U.S. population would be ineligible to donate a kidney because of medical conditions—most of them preventable. Based on the criteria the Bleyers used, 15% of adults would be excluded due to obesity, 19% to hypertension, 12% to excessive alcohol use and 12% to diabetes. That’s not necessarily because a medical condition has rendered the organs damaged. “Our number one thing is we want to preserve the health of the donor,” says Dr. Bleyer. “The donors have to be in really pristine condition.” The more you weigh, the more strain you’ll put on your remaining kidney, and obese people also have a higher risk of complications after surgery and wounds that heal more slowly, he says. The Bleyer team also looked at how financial concerns might prevent donation. Because kidney donors don’t receive compensation for lost work time in the U.S., 36% of healthy, medically eligible people ...