The potentially serious side effects that result from prolonged prednisolone (or prednisone) therapy are well known in clinical renal transplantation. The present study was undertaken to evaluate the effect of less toxic corticosteroid therapy on canine renal allograft. Fifty-three dogs received renal allografts from randomly selected donors. They were assigned into four groups and were treated as follows: group 1, controls, no immunosuppression; group 2, prednisolone, 3mg/kg/day, as conventionally used steroid; group 3, beta-methasone, 0.3mg/kg/day; group 4, paramethasone, 1.5mg/kg/day. Drug therapy was started two days before operation. The blood urea nitrogen (BUN) and serum creatinine were followed twice a week. An autopsy was performed in each dog. The kidney's histopathologic changes were arbitrarily graded in severity, and the graded lesions summed to give a final score for each sample. Beta-methasone has proven the most effective for both renal function and histology of the transplant. The results suggest that beta-methasone could replace part of prednisolone as immunosuppressive agent in renal transplantation, but that paramethasone was ineffective at the dosages studied.
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