[Blood transfusion and kidney transplantation].

The non-transfusion policy for potential recipients of kidney allografts that has been followed in recent years has not proven successful. There is now ample clinical evidence of improved transplant function in the transfused recipients category. This has also been confirmed in recipients of a first cadaver kidney in Basel and Geneva. If the conditions valid for human kidney transplantation are matched as closely as possible in animal experiments, prolongation of graft function rather than accelerated rejection is usually observed after blood transfusions. Potential kidney graft recipients should be more liberally transfused and experimental evidence ought to be accumulated in order to establish a rationale for optimal host conditioning, while avoiding the hazards of blood transfusions to the greatest extent possible.