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©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
Published online Sep 18, 2025. doi: 10.5500/wjt.v15.i3.104873
Living donor transplant: Right vs left kidney
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
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.