This brochure is courtesy of the Renal Resource Centre.
If you have a relative whose kidneys have failed and who needs a kidney transplant, you may be thinking of giving one of your kidneys to help save his/her life and to overcome the long-term problems of artificial kidney treatment.
Transplant results are best when the donor and the recipient are identical on the white blood cell HLA antigen series. Because of inherited genes this can only happen between brothers and sisters where there is a 1 in 4 chance of a perfect match. Parents and children have only a 50% match because only half of the genes in a child come from each parent.
Although this is usually acceptable, occasionally there are problems with red cell (ordinary blood group) typing. Transplants with living related donors are more likely to be successful than with unrelated, or recently deceased donors because the body tissues are more likely to be closely matched. For this reason, the recipients require less immunosuppressive drugs and therefore have fewer side effects, especially if the donor and recipient are fully matched.