Dr. Frank Bures: Living organ donation is gift that keeps giving

[Clark]

http://www.winonadailynews.com/lifestyles/dr-frank-bures-living-organ-donation-is-gift-that-keeps/article_434fb80e-9499-515a-9656-7d16c195b566.html

Dr. Frank Bures: Living organ donation is gift that keeps giving

It’s that time of year when most of us want and need to give gifts. The catalogs are getting fatter and more frequent in the mailboxes, sacrificing so many trees.

I have a suggestion for you to think about, at least just for a minute, and maybe longer than that. It involves giving a precious medical gift because this is supposed to be a medical column. My editor wonders sometimes. (Editor’s note: It’s true)

This would be the gift that could last someone for a lifetime. How much better can a gift be than giving something of yourself to another person to help them live a better, healthier life — or even keep them alive? The gift is being a living organ donor.

Yup, that’s what I said. If you have heard of it, wonderful. If not, I’ll clue you in. The inspiration for this column came from an article I read in the December issue of Men’s Health (not actually a medical magazine).

Headlined “The Don rs” (The o for organ is missing, get it?), it is about living organ donors and how they feel about doing it, with a bit of explanation as to why anyone would do it. It’s a well-written article by my favorite writer, Frank Bures. No, not me. (Heavens, I tell jokes). It’s by our son, a real writer. (That’s our boy!)

It personally and vividly highlights the trend in the past 10 years for living people to donate, in most cases kidneys, but also lungs and liver. The first living donation happened in 1954. The major medical obstacle for decades was the amount of surgery needed to harvest the kidney, and how much liver or lung to remove from the donor safely. These techniques have improved vastly, especially since kidney removal became laparoscopic about 1995, as the article points out.

According to the University of Minnesota, more than 100,000 people are on an organ transplant waiting list in the United Sates. About 100 more are added each day, and about 18 people die each day while waiting.

Organ donation also can be done from someone who has just died, and you can select that choice to be put on your driver’s license. But only about 38 percent of drivers have it listed on their licenses, and overall only 20 percent of Americans have consented to be donors.

Pretty shabby, because we waste a lot of spare parts.

Locally, there are living donor programs at the University of Minnesota, Mayo Clinic in Rochester and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A helpful website to check is organdonor.gov.

I’m aware of three people in the Winona area who have been kidney donors, two for nonrelatives. In the above article, there is a story of a husband who wanted to give a kidney to his wife but was not a tissue match. He was able to donate a kidney to a person he never had met who had been on dialysis for seven years, was married with kids, and was desperate. His wife then received a transplant from a matched donor.

Who would want to do this? And why?

There is absolutely no compensation for it. Bures’ research found professor Abigail Marsh at Georgetown University, who studied brains of 19 “altruistic” kidney donors. The brain portion they compared by imaging was the amygdala (ah-MIG-da-la), an area that is key in processing emotions and social awareness. It’s known to be smaller and deformed in pathologic people. In contrast, the donor’s were larger and more responsive to stimulation, sort of Cadillac size.

Dr. Gabriel Danovitch, head of a transplant program at UCLA, studied living anonymous kidney donors. He discovered, despite their extraordinary act, these folks are “just decent people, normal people, healthy people, who find donating is something they want to do.”

Another study in the journal Psychological Science found people who felt “more purpose in life” had a 15 percent lower risk of dying over a 14-year period compared to those “wander aimlessly through life.” When asked, the donors attested to having more purpose, and feeling healthier.

This was mirrored exactly in the remarks of a local living donor who spoke to me about the experience, saying how much better and healthier he felt. One of the donors mentioned in the article said, “From other donors I’ve talked to, none has complained about it. It’s a life-changing thing to help somebody in that way.”

Sure, it’s not for everybody. But it is something to think about if you really want to give a gift that lasts and is appreciated, both for a life and a lifetime. Color and size don’t matter. Recipients won’t have to return it, either. Who cares if they already know what they’re getting?

My understanding is that it doesn’t cost the donor anything but the organ, according to the donor I talked to. You’d have to check on that. It sort of makes me think of the slogan a local auto parts dealer uses: Let us have a part in your car. Here you might say: Let us (me) have a part in your body, and your life, to keep it running.

Have a happy and healthy Christmas and holiday time.