Risk for cancer in living kidney donors and recipients.

Objective: Malignancy following renal transplantation remains inconsistent with the reported safety of kidney donation during the long-term follow-up.

Methods: We conducted searches of the published literature which included healthy participants, recipients, living kidney donors (LKDs), and the availability of outcome data for malignancy. Eight from 938 potentially relevant studies were analyzed by means of fixed-effects model or random-effects model, as appropriately.

Results: In 48,950 participants, the follow-up range was 18 months to 20 years, and the mean age of the subjects was approximately 41 years. The incidence rate with 95% confidence interval (CI) for malignancy after kidney transplantation was 0.03 (0.01-0.05) in recipients and 0.03 (0.1-0.07) in LKDs, giving a pooled incidence rate of 0.03 (95% CI 0.02-0.04). LKDs contrasted nondonors by the overall odds ratio and 95% CI for total cancer of 2.80 (2.69-2.92).

Conclusions: Kidney transplantation was associated with an increased risk of cancer during a long-term follow-up. Long-term risk for cancer in LKDs and kidney recipients should be monitored.