Upon further thought, 50% may be too high for kidney donation. I was estimating that you’d only be giving your kidney to someone who would die otherwise (there are many more people who need kidney transplants than are available, so the replaceability effect should be absent.), and it had a 50% chance of working. While people who get a donated kidney do live longer than ones who stay on dialysis (and get to stop having to go in for dialysis) they tend to only live an extra 10-15 years.
As the lives of people with major kidney problems are worse than those without, maybe count each year as only 75% when quality weighting? So 50% chance of working 10-15 years 75% gives a very rough estimate of 4-6 QALYs per kidney donation. Still much better than blood, but with deworming at around $100/QALY donating $1K does more good than donating a kidney.
Upon further thought, 50% may be too high for kidney donation. I was estimating that you’d only be giving your kidney to someone who would die otherwise (there are many more people who need kidney transplants than are available, so the replaceability effect should be absent.), and it had a 50% chance of working. While people who get a donated kidney do live longer than ones who stay on dialysis (and get to stop having to go in for dialysis) they tend to only live an extra 10-15 years.
As the lives of people with major kidney problems are worse than those without, maybe count each year as only 75% when quality weighting? So 50% chance of working 10-15 years 75% gives a very rough estimate of 4-6 QALYs per kidney donation. Still much better than blood, but with deworming at around $100/QALY donating $1K does more good than donating a kidney.
This is wrong: the 10-15 year estimate already takes into account rejections and other transplant failures. So I’m off by 50% and we get 8-12 QALYs.
The data is also from a study on kidneys from cadavers; live donated ones might be better.
Live ones apparently are better; I heard this before recently, and this seems to be right according to a few pages I checked, although they don’t cite specific studies: http://kidney-beans.blogspot.com/2009/08/living-kidney-donation-vs-cadaver.html or http://kidney.niddk.nih.gov/kudiseases/pubs/transplant/