Can kidneys from hepatitis C positive donors be used for transplantation or not? Researchers at Johns Hopkins University studied data from more than 93,000 deceased kidney donors between 1995 and 2009. They found that while outcomes are slightly worse with hepatitis C positive patients who receive hepatitis C positive organs, the advantages of more timely transplants may outweigh the risk of waiting for a hepatitis C negative kidney. The study appeared in the April 2010 Journal of the American Journal of Transplantation.

Dorry Segev, MD, lead author of the study, said, “Many transplant centers don’t use hepatitis C positive kidneys at all, effectively consigning hepatitis C positive patients to an average unnecessary wait of a year longer than for an uninfected organ.” The extra year on dialysis increases the risk of death 10% to 15%.

The use of hepatitis C positive kidneys has been controversial in the past partly due to the difference in one-year and-three-year survival rates between those who receive an infected kidney and those who don’t.  Segev observed that the difference “is easily made up by getting off dialysis sooner.” However, Segev and his colleagues found that hepatitis C positive kidneys were two and one-half times more likely to be discarded than hepatitis C negative kidneys. One-third of the nation’s transplant centers did not use any hepatitis C positive kidneys for their hepatitis C patients, the study found, while 13% transplanted more than half of their hepatitis C patients with hepatitis C positive kidneys.