Login to Access Video or Poster Abstract: MP30-06
Sources of Funding: none

Introduction

The rise of non-directed kidney donation in the United States is a valuable source of high quality organs. Compared to developing countries, where there has been controversy over undereducated and compensated donors, donors in the United States are widely considered to be well informed on the issues surrounding their choice to give a kidney altruistically. However, there is very little known about the socioeconomic status and other characteristics of non-directed donors (NDDs). We aim to describe this population.

Methods

We collected donor characteristics from the National Kidney Registry (NKR) between 2008 and 2015. NKR is a network that has performed approximately 2000 exchange kidney transplants from >70 member centers across the United States. As we did not have direct donor level SES data, we were able to calculate a SES index, created and validated by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), by geocoding the donor's zip code and linking it to 7 publicly available SES variables found in the 2011 US Census data (i.e. percentage of households with more than one person per room, median value of owner occupied values, percentage of people below the federal poverty line, median household income, percent of people above age 25 with at least four years of college, percent of people above 25 with less than a 12th grade education, and percentage of persons age 16 or old who are unemployed and seeking work).

Results

267 predominantly female (58%) NDDs with an average age of 45.6 years old (range 21-72) were included in the study. The mean SES index score was 55.6 (SD=3.2), which corresponds to the 77th percentile of 1.5 million MediCare beneficiaries as reported by AHRQ in 2008. See table for demographic information. The average distance between donor and recipient was 954.0 miles and the time in transit for the organs ranged from 0-19 hours with an average of 6.8 hours (SD=3.2). The average NDD waited 4.5 months (SD=5.2) to donate.

Conclusions

The finding that NDDs are in the upper end of the economic spectrum is important in the context of efforts to increase living kidney donation. Additional NDDs may be further realized by removing financial disincentives such as travel expenses or lost wages.

Funding

none