Renal transplantation for uncommon diseases. Scientific Advisory Board of the ERA-EDTA Registry. European Renal Association-European Dialysis and Transplant Association.

including haemolytic‐uraemic syndrome, cyclosporin aged 15‐55 years with the exception of SLE and nephrotoxicity, Fabry’s disease, Alport’s syndrome and Goodpasture’s syndrome where it is 15‐50 years. A reduced hyperoxaluria. This report focuses on renal transplant upper limit was chosen for these two diseases as they tend experience in five diseases, systemic lupus eryth- to occur in a younger age group. For all five diseases, ematosus (SLE ), analgesic nephropathy, polyarteritis, comparison was made with all patients in the database with Goodpasture’s syndrome, and Wegener’s granulo- so-called standard primary renal disease (PRD) within the matosis. By contrast with the advantage of large patient same age group and time period. Standard PRD consists numbers there is the inherent disadvantage of most of patients with glomerulonephritis, interstitial nephritis, registries that a number of patients become lost to toxic nephropathies, cystic kidney diseases, and those of unknown cause. follow up due to failure of some centres to update Patients lost to follow up were not excluded from analysis their progress. The ERA-EDTA Registry had worse but the study was limited to the period 1982 to 1990 as the than average experience in the early 1990s with regard numbers lost to follow up rose beyond 1990. to the number of patients lost to follow up. As the exclusion from analysis of patients lost to follow up is not a satisfactory procedure it was decided for this Statistical analysis of data study to use data only from the years 1982 to 1990. All data analysis was performed using the features of the Another advantage of choosing this time period was SPSS statistical package. Age, gender distribution, cause of that survival rates changed only to a very modest death, and survival of patients with each uncommon disease degree during this time period in contrast to the was compared to patients with standard PRD. Mean ages marked improvement which took place during the were compared using the Mann‐Whitney U test. The male:1970s. The data presented on these five diseases will female ratio and the causes of death were compared using include information on recurrence of the primary renal cross-tabulation and Pearson chi-square test. Fisher’s exact disease following transplantation and this part of the test was calculated where the sample size was small. Life study will be extended by analysing also recurrence table analyses were performed for patient and graft survival rates of some of the other types of primary renal using the Wilcoxon (Gehan) test. In the analyses of graft survival, death with a functioning graft is counted as a graft disease which are itemised separately in the database. Table 1. The number of patients (all ages) with the five uncommon Subjects and methods diseases who received a first renal allogaft between 1982 and 1990