Prospective, multicenter, controlled study of quality of life, psychological adjustment process and medical outcomes of patients receiving a preemptive kidney transplant compared to a similar population of recipients after a dialysis period of less than three years – The PreKit-QoL study protocol

Treatment of end stage renal disease has an impact on patients’ physical and psychological health, including quality of life (QoL). Nowadays, it is known that reducing the dialysis period has many advantages regarding QoL and medical outcomes. Although preemptive transplantation is the preferred strategy to prevent patients undergoing dialysis, its psychological impact is unknown. Moreover, transplantation can be experienced in a completely different manner among patients who were on dialysis and those who still had a functioning kidney at the time of surgery. Longitudinal data are often collected to allow analyzing the evolution of patients’ QoL over time using questionnaires. Such data are often difficult to interpret due to the patients’ changing standards, values, or conceptualization of what the questionnaire is intended to measure (e.g. QoL). This phenomenon is referred to as response shift and is often linked to the way the patients might adapt or cope with their disease experience. Whether response shift is experienced in a different way among patients who were on dialysis and those who still had a functioning kidney at time of surgery is unknown and will be studied in the PreKit-QoL study (trial registration number: NCT02154815). Understanding the psychological impact of pre-emptive transplantation is an important issue since it can be associated with long-term patient and graft survival. Adult patients with a pre-emptive transplantation (n = 130) will be prospectively included along with a control group of patients with a pre-transplant dialysis period