Obese Patients Wait Longer for Kidney Transplants

“Extremely obese adults in need of a kidney transplant appear to wait longer for a donor organ than their thinner counterparts do, a study has found. The findings, according to researchers, suggest there may be a bias in the way donor kidneys are allocated. Analyzing a decade's worth of national transplant data, researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found that morbidly obese patients - those who are 100 or more pounds overweight- on the kidney transplant waiting list were 44 percent less likely to receive a donor organ as normal-weight patients. There was no similar disparity seen among overweight or mildly obese patients, the researchers report in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.”