Letter to the Editor
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2025. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Transplant. Sep 18, 2025; 15(3): 104873
Published online Sep 18, 2025. doi: 10.5500/wjt.v15.i3.104873
Living donor transplant: Right vs left kidney
Evaldo Favi, Marika Morabito
Evaldo Favi, Marika Morabito, Department of General Surgery and Kidney Transplantation, Fondazione IRCCS Ca’ Granda Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico, Milan 20122, Lombardy, Italy
Author contributions: Favi E drafting the article, critical revision, language revision, and final approval; Morabito M drafting the article, reviewing the article, editing the article, and final approval.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors do not have any conflicting interests.
Open Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Evaldo Favi, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of General Surgery and Kidney Transplantation, Fondazione IRCCS Ca’ Granda Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico, Via Francesco Sforza 28, Milan 20122, Lombardy, Italy. evaldofavi@gmail.com
Received: January 5, 2025
Revised: March 6, 2025
Accepted: March 18, 2025
Published online: September 18, 2025
Processing time: 104 Days and 1.9 Hours
Core Tip

Core Tip: As shown by Khan et al in their recent work, there is mounting evidence that living-donor transplants performed using right kidneys can provide recipient- and graft-related outcomes as good as the ones obtained transplanting left kidneys. Importantly, in high-volume centres with experienced surgeons, right-sided living-donor nephrectomies are not associated with increased surgical complications compared to left-sided procedures. As traditional open surgery is being replaced by minimally invasive techniques, future research should aim to conclusively validate the safety and efficacy of laparoscopic or robot-assisted donor nephrectomy also in challenging clinical scenarios, such as right or multiple-vessel kidneys.