Panel reactive antibodies in post-kidney transplantation.

This study was aimed to evaluate the clinical relevance of the panel reactive antibodies (PRA) post kidney transplantation (KT). A total number of 90 KT recipients consisted of 71 male and 19 female patients. Thirty-two haploidentical and 3 HLA-identical pairs for living related KT and 55 cadaveric KT with 3-6 mismatched antigens were included in this study. The analysis revealed that there were 2 out of 69 (2.89%) patients with no episode of rejection who had Pre-KT PRA-T and or PRA-B > 80 per cent while they were 5.79 per cent and 23.19 per cent for Post-KT. No patient in 21 cases with KT rejection had Pre-KT-PRA-T and -B > 80 per cent. There was significant increase of antibodies in Post-KT rejections which were 28.57 per cent and 33.3 per cent for Post-KT-PRA-T and -B respectively. None of 3 cases with graft failure (GF) from chronic rejection had Pre-KT-PRA-T and -B > 20 per cent and only one of them had Post-KT-PRA-T = 80 per cent. No donor specific HLA antibody was found among this group of patients. Although antibody to donor HLA antigens was not observed in these patients, the increase of PRA-T and -B in Post-KT may indicate the immunological reaction resulting in GF.