Alberta Health Services is taking part in a national registry to help patients who are difficult to match gain access to a donor kidney.
AHS is working with Canadian Blood Services to coordinate the Highly Sensitized Patient registry to match Canadians who have high levels of antibodies in their systems with donor organs.
“There are many patients who develop antibodies through the course of their lives, they get sensitized by blood transfusions, pregnancies, previous transplants and when those antibodies have developed it’s much more difficult to find a suitable kidney for them to accept,” said Lee Anne Tibbles, Medical Director of the Southern Alberta Transplant program.
Tibbles says the registry prioritizes those patients who are already sensitized and she explained to CTV News how the registry works.
“So we list our highly sensitized patients on this registry and then every deceased donor across the country has their HLA Typing done, which means the laboratory determines what proteins that kidney from that donor has, those are entered into the database and if there’s a potential recipient who is highly sensitized who doesn’t have an antibody to that particular kidney, that kidney is offered to that patient. So it reduces the chance of getting a kidney to which you are already sensitized,” she said.
She says that without the registry, these kinds of patients can wait ten to twenty years for a donor organ.
“This is a huge step forward,” said Tibbles. “We’ve always had highly sensitized patients. They’ve always been on our wait list, they’ve always, over time, found their way to the top of the wait list because they wait the longest. What is new here is the fact that every deceased donor in the country is HLA Typed and that typing is matched against our most highly sensitized recipients and one kidney from every potential donor is offered to the patient. So it takes the donor pool from our local pool, which is quite small in any centre, and it expands it to the point that we’re looking at every potential donor for our highly sensitized patients.”
She says the CBS system uses a highly sophisticated computer algorithm and special tissue typing tests and is a game changer for those patients who use it.
“I’ve been calling in people who’ve been sitting on the wait list for 15 years and have not been having transplant offers during that period of time, so maintained on dialysis for a long period of time, suddenly get this offer, they come in they get a transplant, they have an easy course of transplantation without a huge amount of rejection and they do well, so I’ve seen it.”
Eileen Williams started having problems with her kidneys in 1987 and received a transplant in 1989. She had the transplanted organ until 2000 and was then placed back on dialysis, which limited her activities and kept her close to home.
“You can’t get up and go like you would normally do. Your diet is different. There’s so many things you can’t eat because the kidneys aren’t working to get the toxins out so you have to depend on dialysis,” she said.
Williams had another transplant on April 1st of this year and says she has been feeling pretty good over the last month.
“It’s been good, it’s been very good,” she said. “You just have to think positive and continue to be positive.”
So far doctors in Alberta have used the registry to complete 11 transplants, seven of which were done in Calgary.
