NurseWeek

Women give up more kidneys

By Noel Holton
September 26, 2000


	You've read the article. Now tell us what you think. Related Sites American Journal of Kidney Diseases Coalition on Donation

Washington (H24N). Women far outnumber men when it comes to giving up their kidneys to loved ones with kidney disease, and researchers at the University of Toronto wanted to know why.

So they set about examining 144 living-donor kidney transplants to see what prompted women to donate more often than men. Their findings are published in the September issue of the American Journal of Kidney Diseases.

"Numerous studies document that women constitute the majority of living kidney donors, but the reasons behind the disparity in donation rates between men and women remain obscure," write the study’s authors. "We studied this issue by gathering data on family members of living donor allograft recipients at a single, large center over a five-year period."

The researchers looked not only at the gender of the donors, they also looked at the characteristics of all of the potential donors within their family circles. They found that 28.3 percent of all medically and immunologically acceptable female family members went on to donate, whereas only 20.3 percent of all compatible males went on to donate.

The researchers found no gender-related differences in donation rates among first-degree relatives, but among spouses, they found that 36 percent of the wives who were acceptable donors went on to donate, compared to only 6 percent of the men who were able to donate their organs.

"The gender disparity among living kidney donors observed in our population can be largely attributed to an overwhelming predominance of wives among spousal donors," the authors report.

Although the study doesn’t examine the reasons why wives donate their organs more readily than their husbands, the authors offer some possible explanations: that some women may view donation as "an extension of their obligation to their family," and there may be a reluctance on the part of families to risk "the loss of income of male family members for the purpose of donation."

They conclude that in order to expand the pool of living kidney donors, the medical community needs to pay more attention to "gender-based attitudinal differences toward donation."