Introduction to Kidney Transplantation in sensitized patients

Renal transplantation is widely accepted as the best therapeutic treatment modality for the patients with end stage renal disease. However sensitization to previous antigen exposure still remains one of the major clinical hurdles for successful kidney transplantation. In this book pre op evaluation for sensitized patients, pre op desensitization, post-transplant management, post-operative complications, and finally results are reviewed with our own data. As an introduction, this chapter deals with definition of sensitization, brief illustration of donor specific antibody(HLA and non HLA antibody), prevalence and cause of sensitization, and approach to the highly sensitized patients such as modification of deceased organ allocation system, acceptable mismatch program, and kidney paired exchange in addition to desensitization.