Objective: Diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, obesity, nephrotoxicity of certain immunosuppressive drugs, and the persistence of a chronic alloimmune response may significantly affect graft survival in end-stage renal disease (ESRD) type 1 diabetic patients who have undergone kidney transplant. The aim of this study was to ascertain the impact of kidney alone (KD) or combined kidney-pancreas (KP) transplantation on renal energy metabolism.
Research design and methods: We assessed high-energy phosphates (HEPs) metabolism by using, in a cross-sectional fashion, 31P-magnetic resonance spectroscopy in the graft of ESRD type 1 diabetic transplanted patients who received KD (n = 20) or KP (n = 20) transplant long before the appearance of overt chronic allograft nephropathy (CAN). Ten nondiabetic microalbuminuric kidney transplanted patients and 10 nondiabetic kidney transplanted patients with overt CAN were chosen as controls subjects.
Results: Simultaneous KP transplantation patients showed a higher beta-ATP/inorganic phosphorus (Pi) ratio (marker of the graft energy status) versus the other groups, and a positive correlation between beta-ATP/Pi phosphorus ratio and A1C was found. In the analysis limited to the subgroup of normoalbuminuric patients, the difference in beta-ATP/Pi was still detectable in KP patients compared with KD transplantation.
Conclusions: KP transplantation was associated with better HEPs than in KD transplantation, suggesting that restoration of beta-cell function positively affects kidney graft metabolism.