Kidney Transplantation Decreases the Level and Procoagulant Activity of Circulating Microparticles

Microparticles (MP) are important players in cardiovascular disorders. Renal transplantation significantly improves the survival of hemodialyzed patients, in part because cardiovascular disease (CVD) progression is lessened. We hypothesized that the beneficial effect of renal transplantation on cardiovascular outcome might involve decreased levels of circulating MP. We evaluated the kinetics of MP subpopulations and their procoagulant activity (MP-PCA) in 52 patients before and 3, 6, 9 and 12 months after graft with reference to 50 healthy controls and we evaluated the impact of cardiovascular complications. During the follow-up, the increased levels of MP observed before graft were significantly decreased and reached normal values with different kinetics according to their cellular origin whereas MP-PCA remained significantly higher than in controls. From multivariate analysis, the levels of MP were negatively correlated with renal function. At 12 months, the decrease in MP and MP-PCA was more pronounced in patients without history of CVD than those with. In conclusion, we demonstrated that renal graft is associated with decreased levels of MP levels and MP-PCA, even more pronounced so in patients without history of CVD. Therefore, we suggest that MP lowering could be involved in the vascular dysfunction improvements reported after transplantation.