DEAD HEART PATIENTS EYED FOR DONATIONS

RECOMMENDATION

A provocative recommendation by the Canadian Council for Donation and Transplantation that hospitals begin using the organs of dead cardiac arrest patients for transplant increases the likelihood that nearly anybody can be a donor.

“ The message we’re trying to get across is that everyone’s a potential donor. And don’t assume that you’re not a donor. Let us make that assessment,” said Dr. Vivek Rao, a heart transplant surgeon at Toronto General Hospital.

As the transplant wait list grows longer every year — with 4,004 people across the country in need of organs as of last December, compared with 2,592 in 1995 — the medical community is searching for new donors.

“ The major problem now, it has always been the problem, is that the number of people who need organs far exceeds the supply,” said Walter Glannon, a clinical ethicist at the Children’s and Women’s Health Centre of British Columbia.

The council’s recommendation will expand the donor pool beyond brain dead people, who have been the main source of organs in Canada for nearly 50 years.

This will help deal with the supply problem, which has worsened in recent years partly because there have been fewer brain injuries now that seat belts and helmets have become standard safety tools, explained Mr. Glannon.

Donation after cardiac death will involve terminally ill patients whose organs are retrieved for transplant after they have been taken off life-support and die.

The council will release a report this fall to hospitals across the country detailing the recommendation, which came out of a forum on cardiac death donation held in Vancouver last February.

In Canada last year, 1,773 transplants were performed, compared with 1,542 in 1995, even though there were 54% more people on the wait list in 2004, according to the Canadian Organ Replacement Register.

Last year, 224 people died while waiting for an organ transplant.

In Canada, there are also fewer transplants done, per million, than in the United States. Figures for 2004 show that in Canada there were 53.3 transplants carried out per million as opposed to 85.7 in the U.S.