[Kidney transplantation: indications, results, limitations, and perspectives].

In France, kidney transplantation is part of - and is reimbursed as - treatment for chronic kidney disease. Long-term survival and quality of life are better for transplant recipients than for dialysis patients. Stagnation in the survival rate of transplants over the past 10 years has led to the development of new immunosuppressive drugs to minimize the use of corticosteroids and anticalcineurins and to induce tolerance of the transplanted kidney.

Long-term results of a prospective randomized study comparing two immunosuppressive regimens, one with and one without CsA, in low-risk renal transplant recipients.

Due to the nephrotoxicity of cyclosporin A (CsA), its benefit on long-term graft survival remains controversial, especially in low-risk patients. Here we report the 12-year results of a calcineurin-inhibitor-free regimen. One hundred and seventeen low-risk kidney recipients were prospectively randomized to maintenance therapy with either a combination of azathioprine and prednisone (group NoCsA, n=58), or with cyclosporine, azathioprine, and prednisone (group CsA, n=59).

Long-term kidney graft survival across a positive historic but negative current sensitized cross-match.

Background: The sensitive cross-match (XM) techniques that have been introduced for clinical transplantation can detect anti-donor immune reactivity despite a negative standard National Institute of Health (NIH) cross-match. One of them uses anti-kappa human light chain globulins (AHG). But there is some discussion about the clinical consequences of a positive AHG-XM in the historical sera that became negative in the sera collected just before the transplantation (pretransplant sera).