NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Extremely obese adults in need of a kidney transplant appear to wait longer for a donor organ than their thinner counterparts do, a study has found.
The findings, according to researchers, suggest there may be a bias in the way donor kidneys are allocated.
Analyzing a decade's worth of national transplant data, researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found that morbidly obese patients - those who are 100 or more pounds overweight -- on the kidney transplant waiting list were 44 percent less likely to receive a donor organ as normal-weight patients.
There was no similar disparity seen among overweight or mildly obese patients, the researchers report in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
"The results identify a potential bias in organ allocation that is not consistent with the goals of our allocation system," Dr. Dorry L. Segev, the lead researcher on the study, said in a statement.
In the U.S., the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) oversees the allocation of donor organs. Segev and his colleagues based their findings on UNOS data for 132,353 patients on the waiting list for a kidney transplant between 1995 and 2006.
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