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Kidney transplantation is an effective form of kidney replacement therapy with the best outcomes and quality of life. However, despite Sub-Saharan Africa having a large share of the burden of chronic kidney disease, kidney transplantation programs are essentially nonexistent.
Zambia, a country in sub-Saharan Africa, with a population of 19,610,759 has a prevalence of chronic kidney disease ranging between 20 and 30%. With the launch of its transplant program in 2018, fourteen patients had been documented to have received kidneys from living-related donors as of 2022. This selection was based on HLA compatibility and cross-matching. With more than 200 patient follow-up months, we present our single Centre experience, highlighting patient and allograft survival in recipients of kidney transplantation at 6 months, at the University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, Zambia.
A review of patient medical records was done to obtain demographics, preexisting co-morbidities, medication and kidney function. With this data, survival analysis using Kaplan Meier graphs in STATA 14.2 was done to obtain survival probabilities.
This study had 14 recipients of kidney transplantation followed up for at least 6 months post-surgery. Of these patients, 9 were male and were aged between 22 to 57 years with a median age of 37. Three had diabetes mellitus, ten had hypertension, one had Hepatitis B, and two had HIV disease. Ten patients had kidney transplantation performed in Zambia where the induction agent used methylprednisolone. The other four patients had kidney transplantation abroad were basiliximab and methylprednisolone was used as the induction agent. The allograft and patient survival at 6 months was 92.3% and 92.9% respectively.
The survival estimate of recipients of kidney transplantation in our cohort was 93% at 6 months with an allograft survival of 92%. Diabetes was also a common complication amongst our cohort of patients.