Survival with End-Stage Renal Disease

To the Editor: With respect to the papers by Krakauer et al. and Vollmer et al. on survival with end-stage renal disease (June 30 issue), 1 , 2 we are concerned about what happened to the patients with transplants that failed. Although such patients may return to dialysis in real life, they seem to disappear from survival analyses. Krakauer et al. 1 attributed death within 90 days after graft rejection to transplantation and then eliminated patients with failed transplants from further analysis. Vollmer et al. 2 eliminated such patients immediately upon graft rejection and checked their results with an analysis in which patients with failed . . .