THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SERUM ALBUMINE LEVELS AND SURVIVAL IN RENAL TRANSPLANTATION PATIENTS

Malnutrition, infections, proteinuria, chronic rejection, chronic hepatic disease due to Hepatitis B or Q surgery procedures and corticosteroid therapy are all the possible cause of the decrease in serum albumine level in renal transplant patients and consequently may decrease their survival. This study is planned to analyze the relationship between serum albumine level with patient and graft survey. For statistical analysis of data persantage, chisquare, ANNOVA analayis of variance and Tukey -Kramer multiple comparisons test is used 38 male and 19 female renal transplant patients at Marmara University Hospital were included in this study. The mean age of patients were 35.3± 10.5 years, the mean hemodialysis (HD) duration was 23.9±23.5 mounts. Allografts of 42 (73.7 %) patients were from living related donor and 15 (26.3 %)of them had cadaveric transplantation. 30 (52.6 %) grafts were still functional, 13 (22.8 %) patients were returned to HD because of graft failure and 14 (24.6 %) cases died. The mean serum albumine level inpatients with functioning grafts was 4.05 (2.8 -4.8) g/dl, in the group of those who returned to HD it was 3.95 (3.2 - 4.2) g/dl and in the group of patients who died was 3.17 (1.5 - 4.2) g/dl. The mean serum albumine level in the group of the patients who died were significantly lower when comparing both to the levels in the group of patients returned to HD and inpatients with functional grafts (p<0.001). The difference between HD group and patients with functional graft was not significant (p>0.05). The results of this study demonstrate the significant relationship between serum albumine levels and renal transplant patients' long term survival.