Retrospective study on the incidence of severe acute tubular necrosis (ATN), defined as the need for dialysis on the first week post-transplantation ruling out acute rejection or technical complication, in our series of 81 renal transplantations from corpse donor. It includes an evaluation of the influence on severe ATN presentation of parameters such as recipient and donor's age, level of plasma creatinine prior to extraction, whether the corpse had hypotension, duration of both vascular anastomosis and procedure, type of removal (single or multiorgan) and cold ischaemia. We conclude that in our experience, cold ischaemia of the graft is the only determining factor among the cases studied for ATN presentation conditioning a reduced long-term survival of the graft (0.758 vs 0.971 at 18 months: p.05). Peripheral blood typing of corpse donor would allow us to shorten cold ischaemia duration, and thus achieve a low rate of severe ATN (13.6%).