Kidneys and Kin

While organ donation systems in the United States are designed to be efficient and equitable, distributing organs harvested from recently deceased individuals to those who need them most, the system often falls short of these goals. As an aging, increasingly diabetic population has sparked a greater demand for donated kidneys, for example, deceased kidney donations cannot keep pace with demand. To address this need, healthcare professionals are encouraging patients to seek out live donors from their existing social networks.

African Americans suffer the most from the shortage in kidneys, consistently receiving a smaller proportion of kidneys from deceased donors than their rates of need indicate. But in his 2011 dissertation, “Social Inequalities in the Kidney Transplantation System,” sociologist Jonathan Daw finds that African Americans, because of their larger and more genetically varied kinship networks, are more likely than whites to know a suitable live donor.

These larger, more varied networks have not yet worked to African Americans’ advantage, however. Whites are more likely than blacks to have someone with a close genetic match that is also healthy enough to donate a kidney. But new medical advances may permit genetically incompatible individuals to donate kidneys, alleviating such health disparities.