Live Donor Assessment Tool (LDAT): Reliability and Validity of the German Version in Living Kidney Donor Candidates

The Live Donor Assessment Tool (LDAT) is a semi-structured psychosocial assessment tool for evaluating potential organ donors. It enables standardization of the psychosocial evaluation across institutions and allows the quantification of the evaluation result.

To evaluate the validity and reliability of the German version of the LDAT in living kidney donors.

We assessed the internal consistency and convergent validity (using known groups) of the German version of the LDAT in donor candidates who were evaluated at Hannover Medical School from May 2017 to December 2021.

One hundred fifty-two donor candidates were evaluated. The mean age was 50.9 (standard deviation, 12.0), 99 were female (65.1%) and 53 (34.9%) were male candidates. LDAT scores ranged from 39 to 78 (possible maximum score = 82). The mean and median LDAT scores in the entire sample were 69 (standard deviation, 6.4) and 71 (95% confidence interval, 68; 70), respectively. The LDAT items demonstrated good internal consistency (α = 0.737). LDAT scores were significantly lower in high and moderate risk donors compared to a low/no risk group as determined by clinical evaluation. We found a significant positive association of the LDAT total score with age and a negative correlation with levels of depression and anxiety. The best cutoff score in our sample was 66.5 with an area under the curve of 93%.

The German version of the LDAT was found to be a reliable and valid tool, which seems suitable to support psychosocial donor evaluation.