Thymectomy and renal homotransplantation.

The course of forty-six consecutive patients were studied for 3½–5 years after renal homotransplantation from related and unrelated donors. Transthoracic thymectomy was performed before transplantation in twenty-four cases; the other twenty-two recipients served as controls. A similar spectrum of donor-recipient lymphocyte antigen compatibility was present in both the test and control series. In both the related and non-related cases, there was no clinical evidence that the patients with thymectomy had either an early or late advantage in terms of survival, reduced drug dosages, or quality of renal function. However, pathologic studies with light and electron microscopy and with immunofluorescence revealed that the homografts in the thymectomized patients had fewer and less severe lesions of the kind that would be expected to limit the functional life time of these organs.