Living organ donors should be told of risks: experts
CHICAGO (AP) — Well-meaning organ donors who want to give a portion of a liver or a kidney to a desperately ill relative sometimes aren’t told of all the risks such a gesture can mean.
Under the worst circumstances, there can be serious infections, long work absences, the loss of health benefits and even death.
On Wednesday, a hospital regulatory group launched a campaign to raise awareness among potential living organ donors about those risks.
“We want to strongly encourage living donation,” said Dr. Dennis O’Leary, president of the organization that sets U.S. hospital accreditation standards. “It is safe if properly performed. But people should not go into this with rose-colored glasses.”
Living donors now outnumber the traditional source of organs — cadavers. Most living donations involve whole kidneys. Segments of the liver, lungs, pancreas and, rarely, the intestine, also can be taken from a live donor.
But patients don’t always understand that giving up an organ is not risk-free.
O’Leary cited the case of a New York newspaper reporter who died of an infection two years ago after giving part of his liver to his brother. Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City was fined for giving the patient inadequate care and halted part of its liver donation program until earlier this year.
“Living donors should be monitored as carefully post-operatively as the person who gets the organ,” O’Leary said.
About 30 percent of people who donate a portion of their livers develop complications such as infections, O’Leary said, and about 1 percent of them die.
Most of the more than 6,000 people each year who become living donors give a kidney, and more than 90 percent of living kidney donors have no serious complications, said the National Kidney Foundation’s Catherine Paykin.
Paykin said her group supports the joint commission’s efforts even if they end up dissuading some donors.
“People that are going to be scared away should be scared away, because it’s a serious undertaking to put yourself at risk,” Paykin said.
More than 80,000 people are awaiting organ transplants, and there aren’t enough cadaver donations to address the need, according to a report by O’Leary’s group, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.
The commission, which sets patient education and safety standards that hospitals must follow to remain accredited, wants patients to take some responsibility, too.
The new campaign includes brochures urging donors to ask lots of questions. They are being sent to the nearly 5,000 hospitals that the commission accredits, O’Leary said at a Washington news conference. The information is also are available on the group’s Web site.
The commission also advocates creating a national database to better follow up on living donors.
Davina Carey, a Fredericksburg, Va., woman who donated a kidney to her older brother last May, agreed that better awareness is vital for people considering becoming living donors.
“There are a lot of ‘what ifs’ and a lot of people who think they know the answers, but they don’t,” said Carey, 32.
“I had plenty of questions,” she said. “I wanted to know if I’d be able to have kids, if there were any complications, and what if my only kidney fails — then what do I do?”
She learned that donating an organ would automatically give her a better chance of receiving a donor kidney if she ever needs one.
Carey had no complications, has since married and is planning to start a family. Her brother is doing well and she said she has no regrets.
“Once you do it, you’re like, ‘Hey, I actually gave life.’ It may not have been birth, but you actually saved somebody’s life, and that’s a good feeling,” she said.
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