Elderly’s organs used in surgery because of chronic shortage of suitable donors

[Clark]

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/elderlys-organs-used-in-surgery-because-of-chronic-shortage-of-suitable-donors/story-fni0cx12-1227052028531?nk=8724b67ee5ec112a0f3d8d2d290f046a

Elderly’s organs used in surgery because of chronic shortage of suitable donors
BEN PIKE

DOCTORS are being forced to harvest organs from diseased patients who are over 80 ­because of a chronic shortage of suitable donors.

The state’s high family ­refusal rate combined with an ageing population, improving medicine and fewer road deaths is forcing the NSW Organ and Tissue Donation Service to use the organs of ­increasingly elderly patients, including some with diabetes and high blood ­pressure.

A growing number of ­patients facing certain death are also travelling to Asia to find vital organs because there are none to be found locally.

The service’s acting state medical director Dr Michael O’Leary said doctors were now crossing over the “upper age limit” to those 80 and over.

“In more recent years we have moved to seeing slightly older patients with neurological damage caused by strokes or bleeds in the brain,” he said.

“This leads to the ‘marginal donor’. Patients who in the past would have been excluded from organ donation — either on the basis of having medical ­comorbidities like high blood or diabetes, or just because they are quite elderly — are now being accepted.

“Frequently we will have a phone calls between donation and transplantation specialists to discuss whether or not a particular potential donor’s ­organs are actually ­usable.”

In NSW about 45 per cent of families refuse to allow their relative to be an organ donor, compared to 15 per cent in leading countries Spain and Croatia. In August the state had a total of 58 donors, well short of the 2014 target of 120.

The shortage has also led to some drastic behaviour.

“Anecdotally there has been an increase in patients looking overseas for (living) donations, mainly for kidney transplants,” he said.