Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Kidney transplant is the only successful treatment for patients with kidney failure, with a high patient survival rate and slightly lower transplanted organ survival rate. Across Canada, 2963 people were on the waitlist for a kidney transplant in December 2007. Kidney donation is becoming an increasingly scarce resource, and patients may wait years for a donor. This is due in part to the increasing number of re-transplants - more and more people are requiring a second, third or even fourth kidney transplant. After a kidney transplant, the patient's immune system recognizes the new kidney as foreign, and tries to reject it. To prevent this from happening, patients take medication for the rest of their lives, but this is not always entirely effective. The patient's body can still try many times to reject the new kidney and over time, there might be permanent damage to the transplanted kidney, and the patient might need a new transplant. It's not always clear why organs are rejected, and it could be that psychological factors such as anxiety and depression play a role. At the moment, there is very little research which studies the effects of a patient's psychological functioning on the likelihood of the transplanted kidney being rejected. It could be that episodes of rejection are influenced by a patient's psychological functioning before or after surgery. If we can identify psychological factors contributing to re-transplant, interventions can be designed to try and prevent organ rejection. The goal of this research is to study the relationship between psychological variables and rejection for kidney transplant recipients. Psychological variables of interest are perceived stress, anxiety, depression, social support, and coping. This unique study will determine the impact of various psychological factors on kidney graft rejection via biological pathways, and is therefore a valuable first step in identifying relevant psychological variables for intervention.