Just How Unlikely Is It for a Donor to Need a Transplant?

I just read a stunning statistic that was extremely reassuring for living donors, so I just had to pass it on. You may already know that living donors have less than a 1% chance of someday developing kidney failure themselves. Did you know that in the “unlikely event” that a living kidney donor ever needs a transplant themselves, they are given priority on the national transplant waiting lists? That would mean they could receive a kidney from a deceased donor in a matter of weeks or months, not years—thus, probably avoiding dialysis. That’s certainly comforting.

But “unlikely event” takes on a whole new meaning when you see this statistic: Of the 60,000 people who donated between 1998 and 2007, only 11 were added to the transplant list! Do the math, that’s about 0.02%–two-hundredths of 1%. And if you were part of a kidney swap or donor chain through the National Kidney Registry, you would receive priority to receive a living donor kidney. I’d say those are damn good odds.