Comparison of the Quality of Life and Emotional Responses in Kidney Transplant Recipients from Living and Deceased Donors in Nephrology Clinics

Background: Quality of life (QoL) is one of the essential measures in assessing a patient's status after kidney transplant, and emotional response is an important factor in evaluating the patient’s compatibility with the transplant. Also, emotional response affects a patient’s QoL. Objectives: This study aimed to compare the QoL and emotional responses of kidney recipients from deceased and living donors. Methods: This descriptive comparative study randomly selected 118 kidney transplant patients (67 recipients from living donors and 51 recipients from deceased) referred to the Nephrology Clinic of Tehran University of Medical Sciences for a post-surgery follow-up. The QoL questionnaire for patients with renal transplants introduced by Laupacis et al. and the emotional response questionnaire (ERQ) by Ziegelmann et al. were used in this study. For data analysis, Mann-Whitney, independent t-test, and Pearson’s correlation tests were used. All the analyses were performed using SPSS software version 20. Results: The kidney recipients from living donors had significantly higher QoL score (especially emotionally) compared with kidney recipients from deceased donors (P=0.04). The score of emotional response was higher in recipients from a living donor, which is related to feeling guilty, transplant disclosure. Furthermore, recipients from a living donor felt guiltier and were unwilling to disclose their transplant compared with recipients from deceased donors. Conclusions: Feeling of guilt and being anxious about transplant disclosure were higher in recipients from living donors. A significant difference was observed in the QoL and emotional response between the two groups of kidney recipients. Therefore, it is important to involve the transplant team, specifically nurses, in the identification of emotional response and planning accordingly to improve the patients’ QoL, especially in recipients from a living donor.