Assessing the Potential Impact of a Kidney Exchange Program in Mexico

Abstract: In Mexico, around 16,527 patients are waiting for a kidney transplant. Since the national brain-death donation rate (3.4 per million inhabitants) is too slow to offset this number of people, a strategy to increase the number of kidney transplants is to consider the available, but usually incompatible, living donors related to some recipients through a kidney paired donation. Several countries have implemented successful kidney exchange programs, where all donors and recipients are evaluated to obtain the best compatibility match among them. While this is a reality in other countries, in Mexico there is not such a program at a national level. In this work, we simulate and evaluate the impact of implementing a Mexican kidney exchange program. The proposed simulation considers an optimization procedure to maximize the number of compatible matchings from a patient-donor pair pool. Results obtained from simulation estimate an increment of 80% in the number of living-donor transplants and a much less accelerated increase in the number of recipients on the waiting list with respect the data provided by the Mexican healthcare sector in 2022. This is clearly a positive result of the impact of establishing such a program in the country.