Twenty-five year experience with renal transplantation at Santa Casa Hospital, Porto Alegre.

: From 1977 to July 2002, 1,376 renal transplants were performed at Santa Casa of Porto Alegre. The number of transplants and the patient and graft survival rates have been rising each year since 1987. The overall one-year graft survival rates were 90% for living donor recipients and 80% for cadaver donor recipients, respectively; however, the patient and graft survival rates increased significantly between the early (1977-1995) and more recent (1996-2002) periods. Pediatric patients (less than 18 years old) accounted for 15.8% of the transplants that were performed, most of them from living related donors. The patient and graft survival rates did not differ statistically when we compared recipients of transplants from "ideal" and marginal cadaver donors, even when we considered only those risk factors that affected graft function in assigning a marginal donor. During the 25-year observation period, 537 grafts have been lost (39%), including those patients who died with functioning graft. We are currently following 834 patients with a functioning graft, with an average follow-up of 67+54 months.