Renal allograft loss in the first post-operative month: causes and consequences

Early transplant failure is a devastating outcome after kidney transplantation. We report the causes and consequences of deceased donor renal transplant failure in the first 30 d at our center between January 1990 and December 2009. Controls were adult deceased donor transplant patients in the same period with an allograft that functioned >30 d. The incidence of early graft failure in our series of 2381 consecutive deceased donor transplants was 4.6% (n = 109). The causes of failure were allograft thrombosis (n = 48; 44%), acute rejection (n = 19; 17.4%), death with a functioning allograft (n = 17; 15.6%), primary non-function (n = 14;12.8%), and other causes (n = 11; 10.1%). Mean time to allograft failure was 7.3 d. There has been a decreased incidence of all-cause early failure from 7% in 1990 to <1% in 2009. Patients who developed early failure had longer cold ischemia times when compared with patients with allografts lasting >30 d (p < 0.001). Early allograft failure was strongly associated with reduced patient survival (p < 0.001). In conclusion, early renal allograft failure is associated with a survival disadvantage, but has thankfully become less common in recent years.