A Racially-biased Test Kept Black Folks From Having Kidney Transplants For Years

Black people have been fighting for equal opportunity for years. It seems that still exists today in healthcare.

According to NBC News, a biased test kept thousands of Black people from getting kidney transplants. And supposedly it’s changing.

But it didn’t happen until Jazmin Evans had been waiting for a kidney transplant for years. It was revealed that she would have been put on the transplant list in 2015 instead of 2019, and unfortunately, a racially biased organ test was to blame.

This news was part of an “unprecedented move to mitigate the racial inequity.” Today, she is among more than 14,000 Black kidney transplant candidates so far given credit for lost waiting time, which will move them up the priority list for their transplant.

“I remember just reading that letter over and over again,” said Evans, 29, of Philadelphia, who shared the notice in a TikTok video to educate other patients. “How could this happen?”

The issue is a widely used test that “overestimated how well Black people’s kidneys were functioning, making them look healthier than they really were,” which is because of an automated formula that calculated results for Black and non-Black patients differently. This “race-based equation could only delay diagnosis of organ failure and evaluation for a transplant, exacerbating other disparities that already make Black patients more at risk of needing a new kidney but less likely to get one.”

Additionally, the National Kidney Foundation and American Society of Nephrology prodded laboratories to switch to race-free equations in calculating kidney functions a few years ago.

Then, the U.S. organ transplant network ordered hospitals to use just race-neutral test results in adding new patients to waiting list for kidneys.

“The immediate question came up: What about the people on the list right now? You can’t just leave them behind,” said Dr. Martha Pavlakis of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and former chair of the network’s kidney committee.

Pavlakis said what happened next was an attempt at restorative justice. “The transplant network gave hospitals a year to uncover which Black kidney candidates could have qualified for a new kidney sooner  if not for the race-based test, and adjust their waiting time to make up for it.” And because of this, every newly listed Black patient will see if they should have been referred a lot sooner.

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