Laparoscopic live donor nephrectomy at a community hospital

Recently, laparoscopic harvesting of kidneys from live donors has been repo rted by major university centers. As a community transplant center, we adop ted a multidisciplinary cooperative approach, including a full-time transpl ant surgeon, a laparoscopic general surgeon, and a urologist with laparosco pic experience, in order to perform our first successful laparoscopic live donor nephrectomy in December 1998. The operative time was 234 minutes, and the warm ischemia time was 2 minutes. No intraoperative or postoperative c omplications occurred. The length of the renal artery was 2.4 cm, the renal vein was 3.0 cm, and the ureter was 10.0 cm. The donor was discharged home the next day and returned to work within 14 days. The transplanted kidney functioned immediately. The recipient serum creatinine concentration droppe d from 9.3 mg/dL preoperatively to 3.4 mg/dL within 24 hours and to 1.3 mg/ dL on the third day.