Second and Third Chance to Stop Having Diabetes. Pancreas Retransplant With Functional Kidney Graft: A Single-Center...

Simultaneous pancreas-kidney (SPK) transplant is the primary option in patients with type 1 diabetes mellitus who develop end-stage kidney disease. Pancreas retransplant (PRt) has become an alternative in patients who experience pancreas graft failure (PGF). There is a lack of evidence regarding PRt in international registers. There are small series of published research with indeed heterogeneous results. We aim to compare PRt outcomes with primary SPK transplant in our center.

The study was designed as a descriptive study of a cohort of 234 patients who received SPK transplant and received another PRt because of PGF at Reina Sofía University Hospital between 1988 and 2021. Kaplan-Meier analysis was performed to calculate patient and allograft survival.

Of these 234 SPK transplants, 53 pancreas grafts (22.6%) were lost initially. In total, 15 PRts were performed. The major cause of first PGF was surgical, whereas the medical cause was the most frequent in the PRt group. There were 60 deaths in the SPK group compared with only 1 in the PRt group. In Kaplan-Meier analysis, the PRt group showed worse survival than the SPK group, with statistically significant difference between groups (P = .05). Patient survival was not different between both groups.

PRt constitutes a viable option for recipients who experience PGF in the absence of formal contraindication. Although graft retransplant survival seems to be inferior to first graft in our series, these results are difficult to compare because of the scarce number of procedures performed.