LDKT transforms the lives of people with end-stage kidney failure, freeing them from dialysis and enabling them to enjoy full and active lives. It is increasingly popular to carry out living donor kidney transplant before dialysis is initiated.

Living donor transplantation offers many advantages, which include providing:

• Better quality of life, as the transplant can be scheduled at the time when patient is at his/her healthier state
• Better survival outcomes
• Shorter waiting time, as compared to waitlisting for cadaveric donor

ParkwayHealth’s multi-disciplinary team of specialists offers a complete range of medical and surgical interventions including acute and chronic disease management, end-stage disease management and kidney transplantation. We adopt one of the latest medications and quality care to undertake complicated transplantations for blood group incompatible and crossmatch positive (sensitised group) patients. ParkwayHealth is the first in offering such solutions to patients in Southeast Asia.

Our Living Donor Kidney Transplant Programme offers open and laparoscopic surgeries. Our team comprises more than 15 skilled nephrologists and urologists as well as specialised nursing staff. Over a 17-year period since 1993, more than 500 kidney transplantations have been carried out in ParkwayHealth. Their ages range from eight to 78 years old, with majority in fourth and fifth decades of their life.

Complicated kidney transplant is now possible with one of the latest advances in medications and quality care.

• Patients do not need to have blood group compatible live donors (ABO incompatible). A transplant is usually carried out when the recipient’s blood and tissue type is compatible with the donor’s. With today’s advances in anti-rejection drugs, tissue typing and good matching is no longer essential.
• Sensitised Patients
  Patients who have had previous transplants, pregnancies or multiple blood transfusions may develop antibodies in their blood that make it difficult for them to receive a transplant as their bodies tend to reject most available kidneys. Improvements in donor-specific screening and pre-transplant process have allowed more accurate detection and identification of potentially harmful donor antibodies. This group of people find it hard to have compatible kidney, as the doctor’s quest is to wash out the patient’s antibodies which are targeted against the donor’s kidney and control the body from making more of these antibodies. The process of cleaning out the antibodies is called plasmapheresis.
  
  If you have end-stage kidney disease and are planning to start dialysis or if you are already on dialysis, you may be suitable to have a kidney transplant. However, having the transplant carried out before you go on a dialysis has a higher chance of success rate (this process is called pre-emptive transplant), and increasingly, more of such transplant cases are being carried out. There is no age limit to undergo a transplant but you must be medically fit to undergo the operation.