May 22, 2002

Growing Need For Organs Lead To Increase In Living Donations

For the first time, organ donations from the living last year surpassed donations from those who had died. The Associated Press reported there were 6,485 living donors in 2001, surpassing 6,081 donor cadavers.

Over the past decade the number of organs donated by the living has been increasing more quickly than those given after death, the article said. This trend has been growing as desperate patients have turned increasingly to families or friends.

In 2001, the number of living donors jumped by 13.4 percent, on top of a 16.5 percent increase a year earlier. By contrast, donations from dead people inched up by just 1.6 percent, despite public campaigns encouraging organ donation.

Of the living donors, more than 90 percent donated a kidney, the article said. That is a relatively safe procedure for people with two healthy kidneys, because only one is necessary. There were about 500 living liver donations, in which surgeons remove a part of a liver for transplant, leaving a piece to grow into a whole organ. About three dozen people gave part of a lung.

Medically, doctors have been dividing livers only for the past few years.

Still, some physicians worry that the increasing popularity of living donation puts unfair pressure on would-be donors.

“There needs to be some protection for someone who doesn’t want to be a saint,” said Gregory Pence, a bioethicist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “This is a major assault to your body, and really bad things can happen.”

He suspects that many patients don’t know the true risks and said the surgeons who explain them have a conflict because they also are trying to save the recipient.

Pence fears that transplant programs do not tell potential donors the true risks.

Although donor cadavers numbered 6,081 last year, each can give several organs. Cadaver organs still enable about three out every four transplants.

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