Jason D. Goldman, M.D., from the Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, and colleagues compared organ utilization and recipient outcomes between SARS-CoV-2 NAT-positive and NAT-negative donors. Organs were recovered from 617 NAT-positive donors from all Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network regions and 53 of 57 organ procurement organizations from May 27, 2021, to Jan. 31, 2022.
Read more in Medical Xpress.
In late December 2022, as severe storms swept across the Midwest, a husband and father waited in a North Dakota hospital for a kidney. A lifesaving donor organ had been matched and was ready to be received by his transplant team—but 400 miles separated kidney from recipient, and a blizzard had cancelled all flights. Ultimately, thanks to a determined courier, a tow truck, a sheriff’s deputy whose own sister was a liver transplant recipient, and a snowplow clearing the way on a highway closed by driving snow and 50 mph winds, that gift of life was successfully delivered to its destination. Read more on UNOS.org.
For National Donor Day, a columnist shares how organ donation saved her life
Organ donors are ordinary people who make an extraordinary impact. Each day I’m personally reminded of how one decision can change a life. My life was saved because of my donor, who made my double-lung transplant possible five years ago. Each breath I take reminds me of the miraculous gift of organ donation.
For me, National Donor Day on Feb. 14 is a time to remember what I’ve been through and reflect on where I am now. It’s a sobering thought that I would have died without my organ donor. I was in respiratory failure nearly six years ago, and time was running out. The medications had stopped working, and I was getting sicker while in the hospital. The call that saved my life came just at the right time. Read the full story in Cystic Fibrosis News Today.
MONDAY, Jan. 9, 2023 (HealthDay News) — A new way of allocating donor lungs that eliminates geographical restrictions could save more lives, new research suggests.
In early 2023, the current U.S. system, which looks for compatible candidates within a fixed radius, will be replaced by the Composite Allocation Score. The new score will prioritize a candidate’s medical needs. Read more in U.S. News & World Report.
A new method of donor-lung distribution is projected to decrease the number of candidate deaths who are on the waitlist for lung transplant, according to a study by Cleveland Clinic and the U.S. Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients (SRTR) published in The American Journal of Transplantation. Read the full article in Medical Life Sciences.
An analysis by Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital researchers shows steep increases in organ donations and transplantations take place during large motorcycle rallies.
The research, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, shows that in the regions where the seven largest motorcycle rallies were held throughout the United States between 2005 and 2021, there were 21% more organ donors per day, on average, and 26% more transplant recipients per day, on average, during these events, compared with days just before and after the rallies, according to a press release. Read the full story in Healio.
Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania’s Pavilion, she’d gazed at the Philadelphia skyline long enough, and decided to get out of bed and walk.
Three doors down, she popped into the room of her friend Dan Napoleon. He was glad to see her, and together they took selfies and live chatted with their kids’ soccer team, away at a tournament in Virginia. They wished each other well, and marveled once again at the unlikely miracle that had brought them both to the hospital’s transplant floor.
Read the full story from Penn Medicine News.
The first successful transplant was performed in 1954 in Boston.
The United States recorded its one millionth organ transplant Friday afternoon, a historic milestone for the medical procedure that has saved thousands of lives.
The record achievement was confirmed at 12:50 p.m. ET by the United Network for Organ Sharing, a nonprofit that runs the only organ procurement and transplantation network in the country. Check out the full story from ABC News here.
During the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, organ transplants plummeted by half. Though there was an increase in deceased donors in 2020 from the year before, there were fewer living donors, possibly explained by the postponement of elective surgeries.
In 2021, however, the rate recovered and the U.S. reached a record number of transplants, at more than 41,300, though a significant waitlist for organs remains and may grow; experts expect there may grow a significant demand for kidney transplants in the years to come due to COVID. Read the full story in Fierce Healthcare.
Background: Decisions about organ donation are stressful for family members of potential organ donors. We sought to comprehensively explore the donation process from interviews conducted with family members of patients admitted to pediatric and adult intensive care units in Canada.
Methods: We conducted a qualitative study using semistructured, in-depth interviews with 271 family members asked to make an organ donation decision. We recruited participants from all provinces with an organ donation organization (n = 10), and analyzed themes using a modified grounded theory approach. On the basis of these interviews, suggestions were made by researchers and family members on how to improve the process of organ donation. Read the complete abstract from the Canadian Medical Association Journal.