FRIDAY, Nov. 18, 2005 (HealthDay News) -- Experts say new techniques can help assess the quality of kidneys harvested from brain-dead organ donors, and perhaps help preserve them for transplant.
In a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Society of Nephrology in Philadelphia, researchers from the Netherlands evaluated a marker called Kidney Injury Molecule-1 (KIM-1) as an indicator of kidney damage in brain dead rats. Levels of KIM-1 activity increased dramatically in the hours after brain death and, at four hours after brain death, KIM-1 levels were nearly 50 times higher than before brain death.
The team from University Medical Center, Groningen, concluded that the pattern of progression in KIM-1 activity suggested that kidney damage in the brain-dead rats began in the tubules at the innermost portions of the kidneys and then progressed outward.
Elevated KIM-1 levels were detectable in the urine of the brain-dead rats as soon as an hour after brain death, the study found. KIM-1 levels also appear to increase rapidly after brain death in humans, the pilot study suggested.
In another study presented at the meeting, the same researchers examined the use of a modified form of the hormone erythropoietin -- called carbamylated erythropoietin (CEpo) -- to protect the kidneys following brain death in rats.
They found that CEpo helped reduce inflammatory markers in the kidneys of brain dead rats and that CEpo also seemed to help prevent deterioration of kidney function after brain death.
More information
The U.S. National Kidney Foundation has more about kidney donation.
