Friday, August 25,
2000 Women Lack Clout in
Transplants
For patients waiting for a kidney
transplant, men are more likely than women to receive the needed organs, says a
team of U.S. and Canadian researchers.
"Since survival probability and quality
of life are generally better with a functioning transplant relative to dialysis,
it would appear that women are being denied a superior lifesaving therapy," says
the team, led by Douglas E. Schaubel from the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. Men were 20 percent more
likely to receive kidney transplants than women, after adjusting for factors
related to transplant suitability. Researchers estimate that 588 female kidney
patients died while awaiting a transplant during the study period, from January
1991 to December 1996. The analysis was
based on data in the Canadian Organ Replacement Register; researchers looked at
the cases of 20,131 men and 13,458 women ages 20 and older. The findings are
published in the Aug. 14/28 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.
The gender discrepancy increased with
age, and the women least likely to get transplants were black, of Pakistani and
other Asian Indian descent, or North American Indian. Overall, the five-year
probability of receiving a kidney transplant from either living or deceased
donors was 47 percent for men and 39 percent for women.
The research team refers to another
study which showed that women with kidney disease in the United States were 70
percent less likely to receive transplants than male patients. One reason,
researchers speculate, is that women's insurance coverage isn't as good as
men's. Other possible factors are that women's immune systems may be more prone
to rejecting donor kidneys, cultural differences may make family members less
likely to donate a kidney to a female relative, or men may be more demanding in
their desire to get off dialysis treatment.
"Whether sex bias in kidney
transplantation rates is existent or nonexistent, deliberate or unintentional,
inequality with respect to delivered therapy is evidenct and warrants further
investigation and possible intervention," researchers conclude. --ByKatrina Woznicki
