Purpose: Management of medical complications such as obesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia and glucose intolerance are important to maintain renal function after kidney transplantation. Recently, it has been reported that nutritional management and rehabilitation are useful to  improve and maintain clinical outcomes. We examined the effects of exercises habits in our institute.
Materials and Methods: A retrospective observational study was conducted on 31 patients, who had been followed up after living donor kidney transplantation. We examined the effects of exercise habits on clinical background and laboratory findings, including transplant renal function. Exercise habits were defined as aerobic exercise 3-5 days per week for a total of 20-60 minutes per day, based on the guideline for renal rehabilitation formulated by The Japanese Society for Renal Rehabilitation. Differences between both groups were compared using unpaired t test and Fisher's exact test for categorical variables and were considered statistically significant at p < 0.05.
Results: The mean age was 51.2 years old, and the mean observation period after kidney transplantation was 11.0 years. There were 16 patients with exercise habits and 15 without exercise habits. There were no statistically significant differences between two groups in patient characteristics such as age, gender, primary disease of end-stage renal failure, and observational periods after transplantation. There were significantly fewer cases of clinical infection and decrease in the levels of CRP in the group with exercise habits. There were not significant differences between two groups in the levels of transplant renal function, the rates of acute / chronic rejection, and nephritis recurrence rates.
Conclusion: Infection is often prolonged after renal transplantation, and our study suggests that it may be improved by postoperative exercise habits. Renal rehabilitation may suppress the onset of sarcopenia and frailty. So, exercise habits may lead to the improvement of long-term patient survival and allograft outcome after kidney transplantation.