Waiting list for kidney transplant. Some patients wait too long

The selection of a kidney graft recipient should be made not only taking in to account biological and clinical parameters, for assuring the maximum pos sible clinical success; the ethical objective to allow every patient equal opportunity of receiving a transplant should also be pursued. In every wait ing list of transplant candidates a proportion of patients remains in the l ist for a particularly long time. The present analysis aimed to find out th e factors associated with a prolonged waiting time, in order to allow the i mplementation of patient selection criteria able to balance unfavourable fa ctors. The analysis of the waiting list of our kidney transplant centre all owed to observe that blood group 0, anti-HLA immunisation, presence of rare HLA antigens and, at a lesser extent, HLA homozygosity are associated with a longer waiting time for a kidney transplant.