Assessing health-related quality of life of living kidney donors using the 36-item medical outcomes Short-Form-36 questionnaire: a meta-analysis

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this meta-analysis was to assess the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of living kidney donors using the 36-item Medical Outcomes Short-Form-36 questionnaire (SF-36). A systematic search of the Web of Science, PubMed, Embase, Elsevier/ScienceDirect, Wanfang, Weipu, and China National Knowledge Infrastructure databases for studies that used the SF-36 to evaluate the HRQoL of living kidney donors up to April 2020 was performed. Stata version 12.0 (StataCorp LLC, College Station, TX, USA) was used for meta-analysis. In all, nine studies comprising 802 living kidney donors were included in this meta-analysis. The research revealed that living kidney donors were inferior in physical health to the general population with regard to bodily pain (BP), superior to the general population in terms of general health (GH), and exhibited no significant difference from the general population in physical function (PF) and role-physical (RP). In the case of psychological health, living kidney donation had a positive impact on well-screened living kidney donors. Based on our results, clinicians can inform potential kidney donors that there is a low risk in donating a kidney, which contributes to provide guidance to design counseling interventions for both kidney recipients and donors.

KEYWORDS:

• health-related quality of life
• kidney transplantation
• living donors
• Medical Outcomes Short-Form-36 questionnaire
• Meta-Analysis

Ethics approval

Not required for this systematic review.

Informed consent

Not required for this systematic review.

Geolocation information

The Second Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, China

Disclosure statement

The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to report.

Data availability statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the (2018 Annual Clinical Nursing Research Fund of The Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University#1) under Grant [number 2018-YHL-27]; and (National Science Foundation of China#2) under Grant [number 81800664, 81970655, 82070776 and 81900370]; and (Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province of China#3) under Grant [number 2019JJ50842]; and (Huxiang Young Talents of Hunan Province#4) under Grant [number 2019RS2013].