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With kidney transplantation the best treatment option for patients with end-stage renal disease, living-donor kidney transplantation has increasingly been looked to as a solution for donor shortage. Yet donor nephrectomy does not come without risks. In a new study, published in Transplant Proceedings, a team of New York Medical College (NYMC) researchers validated the effectiveness of a tool to calculate how well patients who donated a kidney will recover.

“Donating a kidney is an incredibly honorable act, and it is very important that we do our best as medical professionals to make sure that the donors as well as the recipients of the kidneys, have positive outcomes,” said Holly Grace, SOM Class of 2023, who was second author on the study.

For the study, the NYMC researchers examined characteristics of the donors, including age, race, BMI and kidney function before transplant and then applied the compensation prediction score (CPS) formula to calculate how well the donor's remaining kidney would function after the transplant. “By validating this calculation, we showed that the tool can also be used among the United States population to predict remnant kidney function after donation,” said Ms. Grace.

The use of CPS as a validation tool was first reported in a 2019 study conducted in Japan that was lead authored by Kenji Okumura, M.D., now a research fellow at Westchester Medical Center, NYMC’s primary clinical affiliate. In addition to Dr. Okumura and Ms. Grace, other authors on the study included: Hiroshi Sogawa, M.D., associate professor of surgery; Gregory Veilette, M.D., assistant professor of surgery; Devon John, M.D., assistant professor of surgery; Nandita Singh, M.D., clinical assistant professor of medicine; Daniel Glicklich, M.D., professor of medicine; Seigo Nishida, M.D., Ph.D., clinical professor of surgery, and Thomas Diflo, M.D., professor of surgery.