Organ Donation

Around 30,000 transplant procedures are performed each year in the United States. Typically, more than 120,000 people need a transplant every year and 8,000 die due to the lack of availability of the needed organ.

How do people in America get needed organs? Organs can be procured one of two ways - a willing donor (live or legally dead) or a patient has to be matched to a donor on the organ donation list. How does organ donation work? The recipient and donor are required to have the same blood type. For living donors, the organ donation typically will involve extensive testing prior to donation including psychological evaluation to ensure consent. For dead donors, the process starts by determining whether any organs can be donated. Verification of death is often done multiple times to prevent doctors from overlooking any signs of life no matter how small. After the death is confirmed, the hospital is allowed to keep the body of the donor "alive" on a ventilator in order to keep the organs in good condition prior to donation.

In case you were wondering, no, the donor's family is not charged for any expenses related to donation. While some organs can only be donated to those of the same sex, for most organs sex of the donor and recipient do not matter. Interestingly, more so than sex, the size of the donated organs has a larger impact. Consider the difference in size that men and women have on average, hence a man's lung in a woman's body might work, but the lung of a woman may be significantly smaller than that of what a man needs. The difference in size has been known to create an extra "layer of complication" to organ donation in adults. That does not sound like a big deal, but the size of the organ, in addition to maturity of the organ, is one of the main reasons children cannot receive organ donations from adults in most cases. In that same vein, a child's lung would not be able to function well in the body of an adult- hence, in the organ donor matching process, age of the donor and recipient are also considered.

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