Increase Kidney Transplant Longevity by Managing CO2 Levels

Today’s video is about how to increase kidney transplant longevity and keep your transplant as long as possible. It’s my favorite topic because I have a kidney transplant, and on August it’ll be 19 years that I have had my transplant.

This comes from the Kidney Medicine Journal, one of the journals of the National Kidney Foundation, and here’s a piece of original research. “Serum bicarbonate and graft in patient outcomes among kidney transplant recipients: Retrospective cohort study evaluating changes in serum bicarbonate over time.” So if you wanna read that Kidney medicine volume five issue one, January, 2023.

So they looked at people with kidney transplants and they’re looking at that co2, carbon dioxide level to see if you have metabolic acidosis. The first thing you want to do is you want to get your blood work, get a copy of your blood work.

Don’t assume your doctor is looking at this. Never assume. I have so many people tell me, well, my doctor never said anything, and they’re very surprised to find out of all the things that are going on with their kidney health that could be improved very easily.

Once you got the blood work, you got to look at these co2, carbon dioxide number. It’s either going to be listed as carbon dioxide or co2. Find that. Now that number for kidney transplants should be 24 or higher. They talked about in this piece of over a thousand people with transplants in the US, they tracked them over time.

The people who had a higher co2 had much better results at the end. So let me give you the results. “We found that the US community based population of kidney transplant recipient, even small, incremental increases in serum by carbonate, that’s the increases in that co2, carbon dioxide level were significantly associated with reduced hazard of graft loss, all causes mortality, cardiovascular events, and hospitalization.

Now even if you don’t truly have what’s called metabolic acidosis, where, where you’re below that 24 on your CO2 or your carbon dioxide, there’s most likely still acidosis going on. There’s something called UV carbo Hemic acidosis. 

It means that most people with kidney disease, even kidney transplants, have acidosis that’s not being seen in the blood work yet. So that’s why we believe that. Everybody should be above 24 on that carbon dioxide, co2. You probably need to be higher, but for kidney transplants, you should be at 26 to 28.

If you’re not at 26 to 28, if you’re 24, 23, you wanna increase it. You can do that by taking sodium bicarbonate pills, or sodium bicarbonate powder. It’d be like one eighth of a tablespoon of  powder, one or twice a day, and you can do a one or two pills depending on your level. Make sure you get your blood work checked.