For patients awaiting an organ donor the odds are not in their favor. 120,000 patients with need, about 10,300 donors with a gift this last year. But for these patients, a gift at a new life is coming from an unintended source, Americans dying of drug overdoses. An article in the Annals of Internal Medicine detail findings from the transplant registry [1]; in brief, the rise in donated organs from patients dying from drug overdoses has grown in parallel with our opioid crisis.
Living donors can donate a kidney or part of their liver or lung but represent only 20% of transplantations; the rest are from donors who have died from trauma or a medical cause. Traumatic deaths are primarily from the young without significant medical problems and are “ideal” donors. The demographics of...