New Urine Test to Detect Kidney Transplant Rejection

After a 7 year study of New Zealand, Australian & Swiss kidney transplant patients, US doctors 've come up with a non invasive, simple urine test to detect rejection of the newly transplanted kidney.

When a kidney transplant is done on a patient, it does not end there. The patient’s immune system has the ability to detect a foreign organ & can start attacking the new kidney as a foreign body. In order to circumvent this problem, the patient has to take strong immuno suppressant drugs for the rest of his/her life.

It is important to detect this rejection as soon as possible so that the patient is administered several immune suppressant drugs & the new organ is saved & continues to function.

Usually this detection is done by an invasive biopsy procedure which is of much discomfort to the patient. Fortunately, the doctors 've found out that whenever the body rejects the new kidney, a molecule called Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) is released into urine, & by measuring the level of MHC molecules in urine, the doctors can accurately pick up kidney rejection. Also, this test gives results several days before organ rejection can be detected by the standard biopsy procedure, saving precious time.

Src: MedInd