Introduction: Kidney transplantation is most frequent solid organ transplantation worldwide. From 1954 till today thousands of patients suffering chronic kidney disease got the chance for life without dialysis. Despite, the improvement of diagnostics and surgery procedures brought significant growth of number transplanted patients and better outcomes of the intervention, still, number of patients remaining on dialysis long time and number of patients qualified for kidney transplantation in Poland remain not satisfactory. The aim of the study was assessment the number of dialysed, qualified and transplanted patients in respect of their age and gender.
Methods: Data from National Transplant Waiting List, National Nephrology Consultant report and Polish Transplant Coordinating Center Poltransplant has been analyzed in terms of number of patients on dialysis, qualified for transplantation (active on waiting list) in the end of 2023 and patients transplanted. The gender and patients’ age has been analyzed for three groups mentioned above.
Results: Representation of gender was the same in all analyzed groups – dialysed population (20.464) was represented by 39% (7891) females and 38% (479) females was active on waiting list and 38% (521) were transplanted. There was no difference in age between qualified and transplanted patients (females average age – 45,15 and males – 44,37, analyzed population average age – 44,67).
Analysis of patients dialysed, qualified and transplanted in age groups showed significant difference in number of patients qualified and transplanted in groups of younger patients – more than 92% (1155) qualified and 79% (1077) transplanted were below 65).
Conclusions: Kidney transplantation in Poland is well established medical intervention. Selection for qualification and transplantation is medically based only. Both genders are represented equally on transplant waiting list. Small number of qualified and transplanted patients over 65 shows the need to focus on this group in terms of qualification and preparation for surgery especially in ageing population and constant prolongation of expected years of life. Despite the transplantation program of old to old, number of transplanted patients over 65 years is still far from satisfactory in our ageing population of patients with end-stage kidney disease.