Kidney Transplant Support | How to Make Transplant Last

Kidney Transplant Support | How to Make Transplant Last

Today’s videos about kidney transplant support, and how to keep your transplant as long as possible. We’re going to talk about this piece of research here that I have, and what it is, is people that had transplants for 20, 30 years, even longer.

The mean average of the transplant was 30 years. These were interviews of people and the common topics throughout all these people and what they did and what they attributed to their transplant lasting as long as possible.

The first thing they talk about here is maintaining a healthy lifestyle. But first, if you wanna look at this piece of research, One important common thing was a low salt diet. If you get a kidney transplant, the new kidney is very sensitive. It’s more sensitive than your native kidney. So if you go back to eating large amounts of salt, or what the average American eats in terms of salt intake, it’s going to kill the kidney quicker. Also, no fried foods. That’s something that everyone mentioned. No fried foods, or very limited. 

Maintaining, a healthy weight is also really important. The more weight, the more stress on your kidney. Lots of fruits of vegetables they talk about. Now next topic they get into is exercise. Almost everybody exercised. This motivates me to go exercise because exercise helps every single thing when it comes to your kidney, from blood sugar to inflammation, to blood pressure, to your bone health, exercise is shown to help everything and it’s shown to help a kidney transplant last longer.

Social support, very important. Being accountable, having people looking out for you. If you don’t have social support, you can look for it through different organizations, whether it’s a religious organization and there’s lots of transplant groups online, lots of kidney disease groups online that you can join and get involved in.

Something else they mentioned here is being an active participant in your decision making. If you sit back and let everybody else make decisions for you, your doctors, everybody else about your health, it’s not going to turn out well. Everybody here was an active decision maker. They just didn’t accept what was told.

They had questions. They even talk about how they would debate or some cases argue with their doctor. I don’t recommend arguing unless you got a really valid point, but you wanna be an active participant

When you get a kidney transplant, what everybody looked at is here, it’s a second chance at life. It really is a second chance at life, and don’t give up that second chance by getting it just going out there and just eating terribly and doing bad things to your body, like smoking and alcohol, which everybody avoided here also was no smoking, no alcohol.