Objective: To establish a simple and stable cervical ectopic renal transplantation rat model that increase surgical successful rate.
Methods: A total of 208 male inbred Wistar rats (weighing 220-260 g) were randomly served as donors and recipients. The graft consisting of kidney, renal vein (RV) and renal artery (RA) was obtained, and perfused in situ. The donor RA was end-to-end anastomosed to the recipient left common carotid artery (CCA) by using of "sleeve" anastomosis, and the donor RV to the recipient right external jugular vein by using of "cuff" technique. The distal end of the ureter was brought out to form cervical cutaneous stomas.
Results: A total of 104 ectopic renal transplantations were performed in rats, including stages of the pre-experiment (62 operations) and experiment (42 operations). The success rates of the two stages were 80.6% and 95.2%, respectively. The causes of failure in the pre-experimental stage were anesthesia accidents, thrombosis of the arterial anastomosis, massive hemorrhage, air embolism and phlebemphraxis. In the experimental stage, 2 rats died due to late anastomotic hemorrhage and thrombosis. The remaining 40 transplanted kidney survived more than 6 months. The time for surgery was (40 +/- 6) minutes, the average time for donor surgery was (20 +/- 5) minutes, the preparation time for the graft was (8 +/- 2) minutes, the operative time for the recipient was (18 +/- 3) minutes, including the time for the arterial anastomosis (5 +/- 2) minutes and venous anastomosis (2 +/- 1) minutes, the cold ischemia time of graft was (15 +/- 3) minutes.
Conclusion: The cervical ectopic renal transplantation technique has the advantages of easy-and fast-to-perform, shorter operation and cold ischemia time, higher successful rate.