Kidney Transplant Outcome and Organ Acceptance Practice Pattern: A Nationwide Analyses in the US and France

Background The worldwide scarcity of donated kidneys and the decline in the number of living donor transplants have prompted a variety of efforts to expand the organ supply, such as accepting organs from donors who were older or had comorbidities or other injuries. This study aims to simulate the application of allocation policies from the US to France and vice-versa in two comprehensive cohorts. Main Outcome(s) and Measure(s) In the US, data on the donors and kidney transplant recipients will be obtained using registry data from the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN). The OPTN data system includes data on all donors, waitlisted candidates, and transplant recipients in the US, as submitted by the members of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the US Department of Health and Human Services oversees the activities of the OPTN contractor. In France, data on the donors and recipients in the French cohort will be obtained from the national CRISTAL registry, initiated in 1996 and maintained by the Agence de la Biomédecine, which prospectively collects data on all potential donors and organ transplant candidates, along with their outcomes. By law, data collection is provided by all organ procurement organizations and transplant centers in France; research studies based on the national CRISTAL registry are part of the transplant assessment activities and do not require institutional review board approval. Graft survival will be estimated using the Kaplan-Meier method. Duration of follow-up started with the patient risk evaluation (starting point) up to the date of the kidney graft loss, defined as a patient's return to dialysis, or retransplantation. For patients who died with a functioning graft, graft survival will be censored at the time of death. The investigators will then model kidney allograft discard practices using KDRI and perform simulation to estimate kidneys that would have been discarded in each country using the discard score (Monte-Carlo technique). The investigators will also quantify predicted kidney allograft survival of the discarded kidneys. Eventually, the investigators will estimate the gain of allograft life years based on observed survival data. Groups/Cohorts All kidney transplantation occurring in France and in the US from 2004 to 2014 with available data to calculate the KDRI and the Kidney Donor Profile Index (KDPI), with lower values suggestive of better quality. The KDRI and KDPI are currently used as part of the OPTN allocation system for deceased donor kidneys in the US and have been validated as reliable measures of organ quality in the US.