Asan Medical Center has become the first medical institution in Korea to perform 8,000 kidney transplant surgeries, the hospital announced Wednesday.
The recipient of the 8,000th kidney transplant was a 58-year-old patient surnamed Shin, who had been battling chronic renal failure. Shin received a kidney from his wife in a procedure led by Professor Kim Young-hoon of the Department of Kidney and Pancreas Transplantation Surgery at Asan Medical Center, allowing him to return to a healthy daily life.
The kidney is a vital organ that filters waste from the body and regulates water and electrolyte balance. When kidney function fails, patients must undergo lifelong "renal replacement therapy," commonly known as dialysis. Transplantation is the only treatment that allows end-stage renal failure patients, who have completely lost kidney function, to free themselves from dialysis and improve survival rates.
Beginning with a brain-dead donor kidney transplant in 1990, Asan Medical Center has performed a cumulative 8,000 procedures, including 6,312 living-donor kidney transplants and 1,688 brain-dead donor kidney transplants. The hospital has handled one out of every five kidney transplants performed in Korea over the past five years.
The rate at which transplanted kidneys functioned well without requiring dialysis or re-transplantation reached 98.5% at one year, 95% at five years, and 88.5% at 10 years after surgery. The 15-year survival rate stood at 80.1%, demonstrating long-term safety. ABO-incompatible transplants, in which donor and recipient have different blood types, have been performed 1,315 times since the first successful case in 2009 — the highest number in Korea. The five-year survival rate for ABO-incompatible kidney transplant patients was 94.1%, similar to that of ABO-compatible transplants at 93.5%. Shin, who received the latest transplant, was also a case of receiving a kidney from his wife despite having a different blood type. The systematic multidisciplinary system is credited as the foundation behind achieving Korea's first 8,000 kidney transplants while maintaining world-class treatment outcomes alongside high procedure volumes.
"From pre-surgical evaluation to surgery, post-operative management, and long-term follow-up, all medical staff across the Department of Kidney and Pancreas Transplantation Surgery, Nephrology, Infectious Diseases, Laboratory Medicine, the operating room, intensive care unit, wards, and the Organ Transplantation Center work in close collaboration to improve patients' long-term prognosis," Professor Kim said. "We will continue to do our best to ensure that chronic renal failure patients can enjoy long-term survival and a high quality of life."
