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Bridget M. Kuehn

JAMA. 2005;293:1716.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

With about 60 000 patients on the national waiting list for kidney transplants and too few donated cadaveric kidneys to meet the demand, transplant experts are hoping to boost the number of living donor transplants by developing a national matching program for donor exchange kidney transplants.

Several hospitals and regional consortia across the country have developed donor exchange kidney transplant programs. The programs identify a patient in need of a kidney transplant who has a willing donor who is not compatible and match the patient-donor pair with another patient-donor pair that has the opposite type of incompatibility. Physicians then perform simultaneous operations to swap the donor kidneys, and each patient receives a compatible kidney.

Last month, US kidney transplant experts convened in Chicago to develop a plan for a national kidney donor swap program. South Korea and the Netherlands already have such programs (Krannenburg et al. Transplantation. 2004;78:194-197; . . . [Full Text of this Article]