An organ transplant is the moving of a whole or partial organ from one body to another (or from a donor site on the patient's own body), for the purpose of replacing the recipient's damaged or failing organ with a working one from the donor site. Organ donors can be living, or deceased (previously referred to as cadaveric). Organ transplants can be categorized as "life-saving", while tissue transplants are "life-enhancing".

Organs that can be transplanted are the heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, and pancreas. Tissues include bones, tendons, cornea, heart valves, veins and skin

Types of transplants

Autograft

A transplant of tissue from one to oneself. Sometimes this is done with surplus tissue, or tissue that can regenerate, or tissues more desperately needed elsewhere (examples include skin grafts, vein extraction for CABG, etc.) Sometimes this is done to remove the tissue and then treat it or the person, before returning it (examples include stem-cell autograft and storing blood in advance of surgery).

Allograft

An allograft is a transplanted organ or tissue from a genetically non-identical member of the same species. Most human tissue and organ transplants are allografts.

Isograft

A subset of allografts in which organs or tissues are transplanted from a donor to a genetically identical recipient (such as an identical twin). Isografts are differentiated from other types of transplants because while they are anatomically identical to allografts, they are closer to autografts in terms of the recipient's immune response.

Xenograft and Xenotransplantion

A transplant of organs or tissue from one species to another. Xenotransplantion is often an extremely dangerous type of transplant. Examples include porcine heart valves, which are quite common and successful, a baboon-to-human heart (failed), and piscine-primate (fish to non-human primate) islet (i.e. pancreatic or insular tissue), the latter's research study directed for potential human use if successful.

Split transplants

Sometimes, a deceased-donor organ (specifically the liver) may be divided between two recipients, especially an adult and a child.

Domino transplants

This operation is usually performed for cystic fibrosis as both lungs need to be replaced and it is a technically easier operation to replace the heart and lungs en bloc. As the recipient's native heart is usually healthy, this can then itself be transplanted into someone needing a heart transplant. That term is also used for a special form of liver transplant, in which the recipient suffers from familial amyloidotic polyneuropathy in which the liver (slowly) produces a protein that damages other organs; their liver can be transplanted into an older patient who is likely to die from other causes before a problem arises.

Major organs and tissues transplanted

Thoracic organs

• Heart (Deceased-donor only)
• Lung (Deceased-donor and Living-Donor)
• En bloc Heart/Lung (Deceased-donor and Domino transplant)

Other organs

• Kidney (Deceased-donor and Living-Donor)
• Liver (Deceased-donor and Living-Donor)
• Pancreas (Deceased-donor only)
• Intestine (Deceased-donor only)

Tissues, cells, fluids

• Hand (Deceased-donor only)
• Cornea (Deceased-donor only)
• Skin graft including Face transplant (almost always autograft)
• Penis (Deceased-donor only)
• Islets of Langerhans (Pancreas Islet Cells) (Deceased-donor and Living-Donor)
• Bone marrow/Adult stem cell (Living-Donor and Autograft)
• Blood transfusion/Blood Parts Transfusion (Living-Donor and Autograft)
• Blood vessels (Autograft and Deceased-Donor)
• Heart valve (Deceased-Donor, Living-Donor and Xenograft[Porcine/bovine])
• Bone (Deceased-Donor, Living-Donor, and Autograft)
• Skin (Deceased-Donor, Living-Donor, and Autograft)

Types of donor

Living or deceased

In living donors, the donor remains alive and donates a renewable tissue, cell, or fluid (e.g. blood, skin); or donates an organ or part of an organ in which the remaining organ can regenerate or take on the workload of the rest of the organ (primarily single kidney donation, partial donation of liver, small bowel, or pancreas). Deceased (formerly cadaveric) are donors who have been declared brain-dead and whose organs are kept viable by ventilators or other mechanical mechanisms until they can be excised for transplantation. Apart from brain-stem dead donors, who have formed the majority of deceased donors for the last twenty years, there is increasing use of Donation after Cardiac Death - DCD- Donors (formerly non-heart beating donors) to increase the potential pool of donors as demand for transplants continues to grow. These organs have inferior outcomes to organs from a brain-dead donor; however given the scarcity of suitable organs and the number of people who die waiting, any potentially suitable organ must be considered.

Reasons for donation

Living related donors

Living related donors donate to family members or friends in whom they have an emotional investment. The risk of surgery is offset by the psychological benefit of not losing someone related to them, or not seeing them suffer the ill effects of waiting on a list.

Paired-exchange

A "paired-exchange" is a technique of matching willing living donors to compatible recipients. For example a spouse may be more than willing to donate a kidney to their partner but cannot since there is not a biological match. Willing spouse's kidney is donated to a matching recipient who also has an incompatible but willing spouse. The second donor must match the first recipient to complete the pair exchange. Typically the surgeries are scheduled simultaneously in case one of the donors decides to back out and the couples are kept anonymous from each other until after the transplant.

Paired exchange programs were popularized in the New England Journal of Medicine article "Ethics of a paired-kidney-exchange program" in 1997 by L.F. Ross. It was also proposed by Felix T. Rapport in 1986 as part of his initial proposals for live-donor transplants "The case for a living emotionally related international kidney donor exchange registry" in Transplant Proceedings. A paired exchange is the simplest case of a much larger exchange registry program where willing donors are matched with any number of compatible recipients. A transplant exchange programs have been suggested as early as 1970: "A cooperative kidney typing and exchange program.". The first pair exchange transplant in the U.S. was in 2001 at Johns Hopkins hospital.

Paired-donor exchange, led by work in the New England Program for Kidney Exchange as well as at Johns Hopkins University and the Ohio OPOs may more efficiently allocate organs and lead to more transplants.

Good Samaritan

"Good Samaritan" or "altruistic" donation is giving a donation to someone not well-known to the donor. Some people choose to do this out of a need to donate. Some donate to the next person on the list; others use some method of choosing a recipient based on criteria important to them. Web sites are being developed that facilitate such donation. It has been featured in recent television journalism that over half of the members of the Jesus Christians, an Australian religious group, have donated kidneys in such a fashion.

Compensated donation

In compensated donation, donors get money or other compensation in exchange for their organs.

In the United States, The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 made organ sales illegal; regulation by the OPTN has probably eliminated organ sales. In the United Kingdom, the Human Tissue Act 1961 made organ sales illegal.

Recent development of web sites and personal advertisements for organs among listed candidates has raised the possibility of selling organs once again, as well as sparking significant ethical debates over directed donation, "good-Samaritan" donation, and the current U.S. organ allocation policy.

Two books, Kidney for Sale By Owner by Mark Cherry (Georgetown University Press, 2005); and Stakes and Kidneys: Why markets in human body parts are morally imperative by James Stacey Taylor: (Ashgate Press, 2005); advocate using markets to increase the supply of organs available for transplantation.

In 2006, Iran became the only country to allow individuals to sell their kidneys, and the market price is US$2,000 to US$4,000. The Economist, and the Ayn Rand Institute approve, and advocated a legal market elsewhere. They argued that if 0.06% of Americans between 19 and 65 were to sell one kidney, the national waiting list would disappear (which, the Economist wrote, happened in Iran). The Economist argued that donating kidneys is no more risky than surrogate motherhood, which can be done legally for pay in most countries.

Two European conferences in 2007 recommended against the sale of organs. In Pakistan, 40 percent to 50 percent of the residents of some villages have only one kidney because they have sold the other for a transplant into a wealthy person, probably from another country, said Dr. Farhat Moazam of Pakistan, at a World Health Organization conference. Pakistani donors are offered $2,500 for a kidney but receive only about half of that because middlemen take so much. In Chennai, southern India, poor fishermen and their families sold kidneys after their livelihoods were destroyed by the Indian Ocean tsunami two years ago. about 100 people, mostly women, sold their kidneys for 40,000-60,000 rupees ($900-$1,350). Thilakavathy Agatheesh, 30, who sold a kidney in May 2005 for 40,000 rupees said, "I used to earn some money selling fish but now the post-surgery stomach cramps prevent me from going to work." Most kidney sellers say that selling their kidney was a mistake.

Forced donation

This is organ donation that is done against the will of the donor. There have been various accusations that certain authorities are harvesting organs from those the authorities deem undesirable, such as prison populations. The World Medical Association stated that individuals in detention are not in the position to give free consent to donate their organs. Illegal dissection of corpses is a form of body-snatching and may have taken place to obtain allografts.

According to the Chinese Deputy Minister of Health, Huang Jiefu, approximately 95% of all organs used for transplantation are from executed prisoners. The lack of public organ donation program in China is used as a justification for this practice. However reports in Chinese media raised concerns if executed criminals are the only source for organs used in transplants.

According to News.sina.com "5,500 kidneys were successfully transplanted in China in 2002". This number does not include other organs that have been transplanted in 2002 as well. Amnesty International estimates that fewer than 2,000 prisoners are executed per year.

In October 2007, bowing to huge international pressure, and from a campaign to boycott the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games for China's human rights abuses, the Chinese Medical Association agreed on a moratorium of commercial organ harvesting from condemned prisoners, but did not specify a deadline. China agreed to restrict transplantations from donors to their immediate relatives.

Allocation of donated organs

The overwhelming majority of deceased-donor organs in the United States are allocated by federal contract to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN), held since it was created by the Organ Transplant Act of 1984 by the United Network for Organ Sharing or UNOS. UNOS does not handle donor cornea tissue. Corneal donor tissue is usually handled by various eye banks. This allocates organs based on the method considered most fair by the scientific leadership in the field. For kidneys, for instance, that is by waiting time; for livers, it is by MELD (Model of End-Stage Liver Disease), an empirical score based on lab values indicative of the sickness of the patient from liver disease. Experiencing somewhat increased popularity, but still very rare, is directed or targeted donation, in which the family of a deceased donor (often honoring the wishes of the deceased) requests an organ be given to a specific person. If medically suitable, the allocation system is subverted, and the organ is given to that person. In the United States, there are various lengths of waiting due to the different availabilities of organs in different UNOS regions. In other countries such as the UK, only medical factors and the position on the waiting list can affect who receives the organ. If this is not the desired person, it is noted that this puts them higher on the list.

One of the more publicized cases of this type was the 1994 Chester and Patti Szuber transplant. This was the first time that a parent had received a heart donated by one of their own children. Although the decision to accept the heart from their recently killed child was not an easy decision, the Szuber family agreed that giving Patti’s heart to her father would have been something that she would have wanted.

Organ transplantation in different countries

Demographics

Despite efforts of international transplantation societies, it is not possible to access an accurate source on the number, rates and outcomes of all forms of transplantation globally; the best that we can achieve is estimations. This is not a sound basis for the future and thus one of the crucial strategies for the Global Alliance in Transplantation is to foster the collection and analysis of global data.

Transplantation of organs in different continents/regions year/ 2000

• All numbers per million population

The Spanish Transplant Organization led by Dr Rafael Matesanz claims the highest worldwide rate of 35.1 donors per million population in 2005 and 33.8 in 2006.

In addition to the citizens waiting for organ transplants in the US and other developed nations, there are long waiting lists in the rest of the world. More than 2 million people need organ transplants in China, 50,000 waiting in Latin America (90% of which are waiting for kidneys), as well as thousands more in the less documented continent of Africa. Donor bases vary in developing nations.

In Latin America the donor rate is 40-100 per million per year, similar to that of developed countries. However, in Uruguay, Cuba, and Chile, 90% of organ transplants came from cadaveric donors. Cadaveric donors represent 35% of donors in Saudi Arabia. There is continuous effort to increase the utilization of cadaveric donors in Asia, however the popularity of living, single kidney donors in India yields India a cadaveric donor prevalence of less than 1 pmp.

China does 10,000 transplants a year, and experts say that at least 90% of organs are taken from executed prisoners, without signed consent, since Chinese have taboos against donating organs of deceased family members. Amnesty International has criticized this practice, and accused the Chinese of executing people without fair trials. Close relative donations represent only 2% of transplants.

In Israel, there is a severe organ shortage due to religious objections by some rabbis, some of whom oppose all organ donations and others who advocate that a rabbi participate all decision making regarding a particular donor. This shortage has resulted in one-third of all heart transplants performed on Israelis being done in the Peoples' Republic of China; others are done in Europe. Dr. Jacob Lavee, head of the heart-transplant unit, Sheba Medical Center, Tel Aviv, believes that "transplant tourism" is unethical and Israeli insurers should not pay for it.

Comparative costs

One of the driving forces for illegal organ trafficking and “transplantation tourism” is the price differences for organs and transplant surgeries in different areas of the world. According the New England Journal of Medicine, a human kidney can be purchased in Manila for $1000- $2000, but in urban Latin America a kidney may cost more than $10,000. Kidneys in South Africa have sold for as high as $20,000. Price disparities based on donor race are a driving force of attractive organ sales in South Africa, as well as in other parts of the world. The Voluntary Health Association of India reports the prospect of such a small fortune has enticed about 2,000 impoverished Indians to sell a kidney every year. In China, a kidney transplant operation runs for around $70,000, liver for $160,000, and heart for $120,000. Although these prices are still unattainable to the poorer citizens of the world, especially those whose governments offer little or no financial health care support, compared to the fees of the United States, where a kidney transplant may demand $100,000, a liver $250,000, and a heart $860,000, Chinese prices have made China a major provider of organs and transplantation surgeries to other countries.

Safety

Compensation for donors also increases the risk of introducing diseased organs to recipients bec