Anxiety and concerns in Spanish living kidney donor candidates

Donating a kidney while alive is an experience associated with important benefits for donors and recipients. In view of the inexistence of Spanish investigations, we aimed: (a) to compare the anxiety and concerns of Spanish living kidney donor candidates relating to themselves as a function of gender and their level of concern about potential kidney recipients, and (b) to analyze whether the results regarding anxiety symptoms were clinically significant compared with a representative sample of the general Spanish population.

We selected 67 donor candidates whom we evaluated using the State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) and the Scale of Concerns Regarding Living Kidney Donation.

(1) The donor candidates who were more concerned about the recipients, in comparison with those who were less concerned, showed more state-anxiety and more concerns about themselves as donors, (2) the subgroup of more concerned females exhibited greater anxiety symptoms and concern about the consequences that nephrectomy could have on themselves, and (3) for all donor candidates, regardless of gender or level of concern about the recipient, the anxiety levels were not clinically significant.

Anxiety in donor candidates is similar to or lower than the normative levels.