Moral of the story: Donating a kidney is safe for the donor and obviously of huge benefit to the recipient. Donate today.

Source: AMA Morning Rounds 3/16/2010

Long-term health risk for kidney donors appears to be low.

The New York Times (3/16, Rabin) reports in "Vital Signs" that "having only one kidney does not appear to affect the long-term survival of live kidney donors, and the risk of dying from the surgery itself is very low, according to" a study published March 10 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In a study of 80,347 US adult kidney donors "followed for an average of 6.3 years" whose "survival was compared with a group of 9,364" matched, healthy controls, researchers found that "live kidney donors were no more likely to die than the comparison group."