Cancer, Infection Risk Higher in Transplant Patients Than Rejection

Cancer, infection, and heart disease are greater risk factors for death in kidney transplant recipients who die with a functional graft than organ rejection, a retrospective Mayo Clinic cohort study indicates.

“It’s important to have immunosuppression to protect people from rejection but we wanted to be able to say, ‘What are the other causes of kidney failure that we might be able to identify that help improve longer-term outcomes’,” co-author Andrew Bentall, MBChB, MD, a Mayo Clinic nephrologist, told Medscape Medical News.