Triple kidney transplants: ’We think it is the future’

Joy Hindle cried when she found out she couldn't give one of her kidneys to her twin brother. Then doctors gave the Bel Air, MD, woman another option: a kidney exchange, in which she would donate her kidney to a patient who needed one, and her diabetic brother would get one from another willing donor. Hindle and brother Paul McSorley were two of six participants in a triple kidney transplant performed last month by doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center. She gave her kidney to a stranger; he got a kidney from a stranger. Multipatient swaps made up a small percentage of the more than 13,000 kidney transplants performed in the United States last year. But with the creation of a national database to link the 90,000 patients waiting for kidneys with compatible donors, some health care officials expect the number to increase dramatically.