 Hello, I'm Dr. Partha Shetty. I'm a referralist working at Marcos Bittle Millers Road. I'll be talking to you about kidney transplantation. Now the transplantation is the modality of choice and the most effective treatment for permanent irreversible kidney damage. Anybody who's on permanent dialysis or anybody whose kidneys are in terminal stage can undergo a kidney transplantation. In the transplantation, what we do is we take a kidney from a kidney donor and surgically place the kidney into the body of the recipient or the patient. The kidney normally starts functioning immediately after joining the artery and the veins and the ureter. Transplantation occurs usually from two kinds of donors, either a living donor or a cadaveric donor. In our country, a living donor is taken to be a blood relative of the patient who is medically fit, having no prior disease more than 18 years of age and who is mentally competent enough to give a kidney. A cadaveric donor is somebody who passes a very unfortunate accident and whose kidney is well preserved and suitable for performing a transplant. Among living donors, the blood group has to be the same ideally, but we can also do a transplantation with different blood group, which is called an ABU incompatible kidney transplantation. Transplantation has a very good outcome, about 90 percent and above success rate and a kidney normally lasts between 10 to 15 years. During transplantation, the patient must take medications regularly, which normally includes three important medications and needs to be on regular follow-up with a nephrologist. The advantage of kidney transplantation is that post transplant, a patient can lead a near normal lifespan and can have no restrictions based upon the food and water intake. Traveling also becomes easier and the patient will not be on permanent dialysis like how he would be otherwise.