About us:
The leading causes of kidney failure are diabetes, high blood pressure and kidney diseases. By 2010, approximately 100,000 people in the US will be waiting for kidney transplants, and many will die waiting.
Relatively few paired kidney exchanges have been performed in the United States since the first kidney swap in 2000 largely because the procedure requires a transplant program with enough staff to find matching families. Kidney swapping allows patients who need a kidney to take a proactive approach to find a suitable donor. Patients with medically suitable and willing, yet incompatible, donors are matched up with compatible donors. In return, the kidney recipient must line up a friend or family member willing to donate a kidney in return.
Kidney Swap provides information about alternatives to the national waiting list to those in need of an organ donor. We also enable potential donors to submit their information including blood type, location, age etc. confidentially for those in need of organ donors. Please visit our Donate Life page if you would like to donate an organ to someone in need.
Benefits of Kidney Swapping:
● Most kidney transplants use organs taken from cadavers, but organs from live donors have higher success rates.
● End exhausting dialysis, which decreases patients’ quality of life with frequent hospitalizations and infections.
● Avoid long waits which can be over 5 years (and even longer for minorities) on the national waiting list and the health decline that often results from years on dialysis.
● Kidney-swap programs could someday ease the nation’s shortage of transplant organs and potentially increase the number of living donors by up to 15 percent, which amounts to 500 to 1,000 annual kidney transplants in addition to cutting medical costs by getting people off dialysis.
For information on how to cope with your kidney disease while you wait for an organ please visit the National Kidney Foundation.
