On the other hand, the rate of complication was much lower in patients who obtained the organ through a legal transplant within their own country. The most popular countries patients traveled to for surgery were the Philippines, India and Pakistan.
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The practice of “transplant tourism” has been banned in most countries, but black market donor selling is still prevalent in a few. Investigators in Bahrain set out to assess this by evaluating the health outcomes of patients who purchased organs internationally and came to their medical center for follow-up care.
The research team found that patients who bought kidneys overseas had higher rates of complications such as ureter obstruction and fluid buildup. Organs procured during the weekend were also 20 percent more likely to be discarded than kidneys procured on other days, and those that were discarded were of higher quality than those discarded during the rest of the week.
Deceased donor kidneys are increasingly being discarded, and efforts to boost their use for transplantation are needed. They were compared with 123 recipients of living related donor transplants. When it comes to survival, both showed somehow similar results.
Researchers found that one- and 10-year survival rates for organs received by commercial recipients versus related donors was 91 percent and 22 percent versus 98 percent and 44 percent.
The study was presented at the American Society of Nephrology annual meeting prior to its publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
Dr. Gabriel Danovitch, director of kidney transplantation at the University of California, Los Angeles, said it is not sure that how common it is for U.S. patients to take a chance to travel overseas for buying a kidney on black market.
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The practice of travelling overseas for purchase of organs for transplant has gained popularity in recent years. Larger centers tend to have more resources available and the ability to continue to perform transplantation over the weekends more easily than smaller centers. According to reports, a patient has to wait for an average of about 3.6 years for first kidney transplant.
