During the period May 20, 1969 to December 14, 1970, histocompatibility testing was performed on 21 patients undergoing renal transplantation in Japan.
The data was divided into two groups; prospective and retrospective. The prospective group included 10 related donors. The retrospective group included 10 related and one unrelated donor. We noted as a critical point, the percent incompatibility, the Terasaki matching grade, the net histocompatibility ratio, and the date and timing of clinical rejection episodes.
Our results showed that prospective tissue typing was highly correlated with clinical outcome and survivial among the related transplants. However, the retrospectively typed cases did not correlate with the clinical observation.
Lack of correlation between the retrospective histocompatibility and clinical outcome might hypothetically suggest antigenic modification of HL-A antigen in organ transplant recipient or dialysed patient. Additional studies will be necessary to interpret retrospective histocompatibility testing.
This is the first series of organ transplantations correlated with histocompatibility testing to be reported from Japan.
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