Wiley Periodicals Inc. C © 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C © 2010 The American Society of Transplantation and the American Society of Transplant Surgeons doi: 10.1111/j.1600-6143.2010.03211.x Influence of Recipient Race on the Outcome of

Racial differences on the outcome of simultaneous pancreas and kidney (SPK) transplantation have not been well studied. We compared mortality and graft survival of African Americans (AA) recipients to other racial/ethnic groups (non-AA) using the national data. We studied a total of 6585 adult SPK transplants per-formed in the United States between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2007. We performed multivariate lo-gistic regression analyses to determine risk factors as-sociated with early graft failure and immune-mediated late graft loss. We used conditional Kaplan–Meier sur-vival and multivariate Cox regression analyses to es-timate late death-censored kidney and pancreas graft failure and death between the groups. Although there was no racial disparity in the first 90 days, AA pa-tients had 38 % and 47 % higher risk for late death-censored kidney and pancreas graft failure, respec-tively (p = 0.006 and 0.001). AA patients were twice more likely to lose the kidney and pancreas graft due to rejection (OR 2.31 and 1.86, p = 0.002 and 0.008, re-spectively). Bladder pancreas drainage was associated with inferior patient survival (HR 1.42, 95%CI 1.15, 1.75, p = 0.001). In the era of modern immunosuppresion, AA SPK transplant patients continue to have inferior graft outcome. Additional studies to explore themech-anisms of such racial disparity are warranted