Savoye et al. performed a retrospective analysis to assess early outcomes of kidney transplants in the French controlled donation after circulatory death (cDCD) program by comparing them to transplants from donation after brain death (DBD) donors in the French National cohort.  

The French cDCD protocol has three main characteristics: the use of normothermic regional perfusion (NRP) and hypothermic machine perfusion (HMP) while attempting to keep the cold ischemic time as short as possible. They included 499 cDCD and 6,185 DBD transplantations in the full cohort, and the matched cohort included 442 cDCD and 809 DBD transplants.

They found that:

• The cDCD group had less DGF than the DBD group
• Although slightly fewer graft failures in the cDCD group (5.0% vs 6.1%), it did not reach statistical significance
• They found that the risk of DGF among DBD transplants was lower when hypothermic machine perfusion was used

Overall, the early outcomes for the French cDCD program were similar or better than comparable DBD transplants.

Read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.1111/ajt.16425