Confirmation of the utility of the fine needle aspiration biopsy of the transplanted kidney

The safe, nonsurgical biopsy approach using a fine needle technique, first described by the Arab physician Abul Kassim Chalaf ben Abbas el-Zahravi of Cordova around 1,000 A.D., was adapted for clinical practice for solid mass lesions by Franzen in 1960. Pasternack modified the technique to safely enter the human renal transplant. Shortly after the pioneering work of Strom et al. demonstrated the importance of examination of intragraft events, Robert and Hayry showed that one could examine the intragraft of events by cytologic examination of the inflammatory infiltrate obtained by aspiration using the fine needle approach. It has been suggested most recently in a review article by Hayry and von Willebrand that the fine needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) of the transplanted kidney may be an important diagnostic tool to ascertain the presence and nature of immune activation in the transplanted kidney and to identify postsurgical acute renal failure. Our study was designed to attempt to confirm the utility of the FNAB technique in the United States.