Five people received new kidneys last week in what hospital officials on Monday described as the first-ever quintuple kidney transplant.
Surgical teams at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore performed a cascade of kidney transplants, transferring organs from five healthy individuals into five patients in need of kidneys in one massive operation, the hospital announced Monday.
The procedure, known as kidney paired donation, or KPD, took place Nov. 14. The five-way operation ? the largest such procedure to date ? lasted 10 hours and combined the efforts of a dozen surgeons, 11 anesthesiologists and 18 nurses working in six operating rooms.
The operation carries hope for expanding available donor options in a system swamped with those in need of a kidney.
All five recipients — three men and two women — are fine, as are the five donors, all women. The donors and recipients came from Ontario, Maine, Maryland, West Virginia, Florida and California.
Kidney transplantation or renal transplantation is the organ transplant of a kidney in a patient with end-stage renal disease. Kidney transplantation is typically classified as deceased-donor (formerly known as cadaveric) or living-donor transplantation depending on the source of the recipient organ. Living-donor renal transplants are further characterized as genetically related (living-related) or non-related (living-unrelated) transplants, depending on whether a biological relationship exists between the donor and recipient.