Potential Impact of Donors’ Factors on Survival Times of Transplanted Hearts and Lungs

Abstract

Organ transplantation is becoming a major public health issue worldwide due to its attributable death rate and excessive cost. The supply of available organs from deceased donors does not meet the demand. Twenty people die each day while waiting for a transplant in the United States. National organ donation has increased in the past two decades; yet, the number of individuals who need transplants has risen much faster. A new patient is added to the national transplant waiting list every 10 min.To address this disparity, not only the number of donors must be increased, but also the discard rate of available organs must be reduced. For example, the discard rate for kidney has increased by almost four times from approximately 5% to nearly 20% between the late 1980s and 2009. Hence, it is important to investigate the factors that may decrease the discard rate. At the same time, it is essential to investigate the factors that may increase the survival time of transplanted organs.In this paper, we study the potential impact of donor's factors on the survival time of the transplanted hearts and lungs between 1987 and 2010 in the US. Using statistical survival analysis, we investigate five factors including donor's age, gender, history of cancer, history of smoking, and blood type of the donated organs.Our results show that each of these factors may correlate with the survival time of the transplanted organ in one way or another. For example, the donor's age is an important factor for transplanted hearts and lungs, which means that transplanted organs from younger donors have longer survival time. In comparison, the donor's gender is a significant factor for transplanted hearts but does not correlate with the survival time of transplanted lungs. Based on the survival analysis of transplanted organs, the donor history of cancer and donor history of smoking cigarette were both important factors with regard to the survival times of transplanted hearts and lungs. We observed that donor's blood type has moderate correlation with survival times of transplanted hearts and lungs.