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Study: Correcting the Discrepancy Among Races and Live Kidney Transplants

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Naoru Koizumi: NSF study aims to correct racial disparity in access to live-donor kidney transplants.

鈥淟ife after a kidney transplant is so much better than being on dialysis,鈥 said , a professor and the associate dean of research at the . 鈥淏ut minority patients鈥攑articularly black Americans鈥攄on鈥檛 have equal access to transplants.鈥

It is also crucial, she added, that transplanted kidneys come from living donors, where there is survival time of over 15 years. Kidneys from living donors add 5 to 7 years with a higher quality of life to the recipient.

鈥淭hat鈥檚 why we want to give living donor transplants to as many patients as possible,鈥 said Koizumi. 鈥淎frican Americans are particularly the ones that don't get to be on a transplant list.鈥

Minorities are at a disadvantage when it comes to live kidney access for many reasons, including cost, insurance, and location. Where you live is an important factor as to when and what type of kidney transplant is available鈥攁nd traveling great distances to be higher on a waiting list of recipients can be cost prohibitive, particularly for those living in underserved regions.

Working with transplant programs at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University, Koizumi leads a 亚洲AV-led team hoping to create an algorithm to identify the optimal ways to increase live donor transplant access for minority patients, particularly those from low socioeconomic black communities.

In other words, Koizumi leads a team of medical and data researchers to correct the racial discrepancy of live kidney transplants.

The three-year study, Collaborative Research: SCH: Optimal Desensitization Protocol in Support of a Kidney Paired Donation (KPD) System,is funded by the National Science Foundation. Koizumi serves as the principal investigator overseeing the $996,766 grant, $677,361 of which funds Mason鈥檚 involvement.

Joining Koizumi are Professor and Assistant Professor from Mason鈥檚 . Both teach systems engineering and operations research. Researchers at the University of Maryland and the University of Louisville are also contributing to the study.

For Koizumi, the topic of organ transplants has interested her since early 2000, when she was studying for her first doctoral degree at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on geographic disparity in health care access. But it was while earning her second doctorate in environmental and preventative medicine at Japan鈥檚 Hyogo College of Medicine studying end-stage renal and liver diseases that she encountered the issue of race and class among kidney transplants in the U.S.

During that time, Koizumi met two kidney surgeons, both of them black, at the George Washington University Hospital Transplant Institute and Howard University 鈥渨ho taught me a lot about racism in medicine and their own personal discrimination experiences during medical training,鈥 she said: GWU鈥檚 Joseph Keith Melancon and Howard鈥檚 Clive O. Callender, last year鈥檚 Pioneer Award recipient from the American Society of Transplant Surgeons and the first black transplant surgeon in the U.S.

They became mentors who 鈥渢aught me a lot about the racial disparity in access to kidney transplants.鈥

Once the study is complete in 2025, programs can be designed locally鈥擪oizumi is working with patients in Washington, D.C.鈥檚 Wards 6 and 7鈥攁nd then nationally by promoting kidney-paired donation (KPD), which allows 鈥渄onor swapping鈥 among incompatible donor-patient pairs in the Washington, D.C., region.

International impact, she said, 鈥渋s not out of the question. There鈥檚 a lot of potential in that.鈥