Ice-cooled preservation of kidneys damaged by warm ischaemia.

Experiments in dogs were performed to determine the effects of 40 additional minutes of pre-cooling warm ischaemic time on kidneys cooled for 5 hours in ice and then retransplanted. A comparison was made with control kidneys in the same animals cooled for 5 hours with minimal warm ischaemia. The 40 minutes of warm ischaemia caused severe and partly irreversible damage in most experiments.