FINDING the ideal kidney donor may become easier, say researchers in the US.
鈥淲e鈥檝e identified a new pool of ideal donors that nobody knew about,鈥� says
William Burlingham at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Burlingham and his colleagues looked at the medical histories of 205
transplant patients who received a kidney from a sibling. They found that
survival of the graft at 5 and 10 years was 28 per cent higher when a mismatch
in one key kidney antigen was shared by the mother rather than the father.
The team thinks exposure to maternal tissue in the womb makes a person鈥檚
immune system less likely to reject tissue with the same antigens (The New
England Journal of Medicine, vol 339, p 1657).
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