Laparoscopic versus open donor nephrectomy: Which is better for vessel length preservation - A randomized clinical study

Objectives: The objective of this study is to report the difference in loss of length of the renal artery and vein between an open and laparoscopic renal donor nephrectomy. Methodology: We take 50 open and 50 laparoscopic renal donors for comparison of loss of length of the renal artery and vein. This is a single-blinded study. All patients considered for left donor nephrectomy with a single renal artery and vein are included in the study. Patients considered for right donor nephrectomy, abnormal renal artery and vein anatomy, atherosclerotic renal artery or vein are excluded from the study. Results: In our study, we take 50 open renal donor nephrectomies and 50 laparoscopic renal donor nephrectomies from a total of 115 renal donor nephrectomies from December 2020 to April 2021. For removing bias, we take only the left side nephrectomy which has a single artery and vein. We used study randomizer software which uses cluster randomization which decides case should be operated on either open or laparoscopy. Conclusions: In our study, the difference between preoperative and intraoperative artery length for open donor nephrectomy (ODN) was 0.3 cm, and vein length was 2.3 cm and the difference between preoperative and intraoperative artery length for laparoscopic donor nephrectomy (LDN) was 0.5 cm, and vein length was 2.5 cm. The difference between renal artery length in open versus LDN is 0.2 cm, and the difference between renal vein length in ODN versus LDN is 0.2 cm, which is statistically insignificant.