Outcomes following living kidney donation

The research that forms the content of this thesis has been performed over the last 14 years and is an ongoing line of research that I am likely to perform for the rest of my career. While a great deal of research has been performed on transplant recipients, it became clear to me 14 years ago that there was limited good research on the outcomes of people who donate their kidneys to people with end-stage kidney disease (except for short-term outcomes in the immediate post-operative period). I subsequently embarked on a research path that commenced with a series of systematic reviews, followed by cross-sectional studies and finally to the commencement of a large prospective observational study to explore in more detail the outcomes of living kidney donors. This dissertation reviews my research to date, with the large prospective study still years away from completion. My research efforts have not included commercial donors, who likely have quite different outcomes. There are a number of important patient-level outcomes that I have explored and so I have divided this thesis into chapters based upon groups of these outcomes. Within the chapters I follow a primarily temporal order for my research and describe some other key publications from other research groups.