Editorial for a special issue on kidney transplant

Excerpt

In the past 10 years, there has been a dramatic change within the kidney transplant population. The incidence and prevalence of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) have been consistently rising since the late 1980s. Furthermore, to make things more complex, the prediction is that in the next 10 years, people affected by ESRD will duplicate due to the increment of diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure (HBP). Due to the traffic accidents reduction (as low as they were in the 1960s), optimal young kidney donors are nowadays more and more an exception. Data from the Organización Nacional de Trasplantes (ONT) show that in Spain, traffic accidents reduced from 43 % in the 1990s to 6 % in 2012 and cerebrovascular accidents increased from 39 % in the 1990s to 62.2 % in 2012. From the kidney transplant point of view, this has led to the utilization of sub-optimal donors such as donors older than 60 or with high comorbidities. Despite this, the 5-year survival rate of patients transplanted from expanded criteria donors is significantly better than those on dialysis being 86.3 versus 67.3 %, respectively [1]. …