Non-heart-beating Donation - Organs That Can Be Used

Organs That Can Be Used

Kidneys can be used from category II donors, and all organs except the heart can potentially be used from category III, IV and V donors. An unsuccessful kidney recipient can remain on dialysis, unlike recipients of some other organs, meaning that a failure will not result in death.

Kidneys from uncontrolled (category II) donors must be assessed with care as there is otherwise a high rate of failure. Many centres have protocols for formal viability assessment. Relatively few centres worldwide retrieve such kidneys, and leaders in this field include the transplant units in Maastricht (the Netherlands), Newcastle upon Tyne and Leicester (United Kingdom), Madrid and Barcelona (Spain), Pavia (Italy) and Washington, DC (United States).

Livers and lungs for transplant can only be taken from controlled donors, and are still somewhat experimental as they have only been performed successfully in relatively few centres. In the United Kingdom, NHBD liver transplants are currently performed in Addenbrooke's Hospital Cambridge, Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, King's College Hospital London, Leeds, Newcastle upon Tyne and the Scottish Liver Transplant Unit in Edinburgh. The International Meeting on Transplantation from Non-Heart Beating Donors is organised in the UK every 2 years and brings together specialists in transplantation including transplant physicians, surgeons, fellows, nurses, coordinators, intensive care physicians, perfusion technicians, ethicists, and researchers interested in the aspects of retrieval, preservation and transplantation of DCD thoracic and abdominal organs and cells. Lectures are held by experts on the most challenging themes such as clinical outcomes of transplantation of controlled and uncontrolled DCD organs, progress made on machine perfusion of kidneys, livers, lungs and hearts and ethics and legal issues regarding donation after cardiac death.