06-29-2006, 05:19 AM
Ont. organ pool to include heart failure victims
CTV.ca News Staff
In a bold move to address a major shortage of transplant organs, Ontario will become the first province in Canada to start accepting them from people who have died of heart failure.
Changes in guidelines to accept so-called donation after cardio-circulatory death (DCD) could potentially expand the potential donor pool by hundreds, the provincial agency in charge of organ and tissue donations announced Tuesday.
The move to allow such donations came after an Ottawa family asked that their daughter be allowed to fulfill her wish to become an organ donor after a sudden illness left her hospitalized and on life support suffering from heart failure.
The Therien family decided to withdraw life support.
They then approached the medical team at the Ottawa Hospital with the wishes of their daughter Sara Beth and urged them to take her kidneys.
"The Therien family said literally, 'Why not? Why can't you make this happen?'," said Dr. Joe Pagliarello, medical director of Organ and Tissue Donation and co-chair of the Organ and Tissue Donation Committee at the Ottawa Hospital.
"Donation after cardiac death ... marks a new era for organ donation in this wonderful country and that makes Sara Beth a pioneer -- way to go, sweetheart," her father Emile Therien said at a press conference held Tuesday at the Ottawa Hospital by The Trillium Gift of Life Network.
He expressed his hope that such organ donations will be become more commonplace in the near future and give more "families the opportunity to fulfill their loved ones' donations wishes."
A fall launch for the program is possible, Pagliarello said.
"This can't happen for every patient, in fact we probably estimate that this may be possible for perhaps an additional 25 per cent of our donors," he said.
"I hope, in the future to make this happen for every family. We will then have achieved our objective," Pagliarello said.
Traditionally, doctors have retrieved transplant organs only from patients who they have declared brain dead -- when all brain function in the patient has ceased and there is no possibility of recovery.
The donors' organs are then artificially maintained until they can be transplanted.
Under the new criteria, the federal Canadian Council for Donation and Transplantation recommends: an absence of a pulse, blood pressure and respiration for five minutes, before two physicians pronounce the patient dead and the organs eligible for consideration.
"It's long overdue," George Marcello, organ donation advocate and two-time liver transplant recipient, told CTV Newsnet. "Ontario's the first here but I'm hoping it will spread right across the country."
Marcello created Step by Step, a group committed to increasing organ donor awareness, and has been actively campaigning for donation after cardio-circulatory death for several years.
The council also has criteria for retrieving organs from people who have cardiac arrest after life support ends.
Scientists at the Ottawa Hospital have estimated that if they had been able to retrieve organs from cardiac arrest patients, they would have had access to another 28 kidneys -- a 30 per cent increase -- over an 18-month period.
In Ontario, there are nearly 1,800 patients waiting for an organ transplant. In 2004, 122 of them died.
But while 30,000 people die in Ontario hospitals ever year, only about 1.5 per cent of them meet the brain-dead criteria.
This new move opening the door to eligible cardiac-arrest patients could add hundreds more donors to the pool.
Not all donors, however, would be medically suitable and not all hospitals would be able to do the transplants.
Canada has one of the poorest organ donation rates in the developed world, but recent figures suggest the tide is turning.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information reported last year that the number of transplants in Canada went up 22 per cent between 1994 and 2003. But the number of brain-dead donors remained the same.
CTV.ca News Staff
In a bold move to address a major shortage of transplant organs, Ontario will become the first province in Canada to start accepting them from people who have died of heart failure.
Changes in guidelines to accept so-called donation after cardio-circulatory death (DCD) could potentially expand the potential donor pool by hundreds, the provincial agency in charge of organ and tissue donations announced Tuesday.
The move to allow such donations came after an Ottawa family asked that their daughter be allowed to fulfill her wish to become an organ donor after a sudden illness left her hospitalized and on life support suffering from heart failure.
The Therien family decided to withdraw life support.
They then approached the medical team at the Ottawa Hospital with the wishes of their daughter Sara Beth and urged them to take her kidneys.
"The Therien family said literally, 'Why not? Why can't you make this happen?'," said Dr. Joe Pagliarello, medical director of Organ and Tissue Donation and co-chair of the Organ and Tissue Donation Committee at the Ottawa Hospital.
"Donation after cardiac death ... marks a new era for organ donation in this wonderful country and that makes Sara Beth a pioneer -- way to go, sweetheart," her father Emile Therien said at a press conference held Tuesday at the Ottawa Hospital by The Trillium Gift of Life Network.
He expressed his hope that such organ donations will be become more commonplace in the near future and give more "families the opportunity to fulfill their loved ones' donations wishes."
A fall launch for the program is possible, Pagliarello said.
"This can't happen for every patient, in fact we probably estimate that this may be possible for perhaps an additional 25 per cent of our donors," he said.
"I hope, in the future to make this happen for every family. We will then have achieved our objective," Pagliarello said.
Traditionally, doctors have retrieved transplant organs only from patients who they have declared brain dead -- when all brain function in the patient has ceased and there is no possibility of recovery.
The donors' organs are then artificially maintained until they can be transplanted.
Under the new criteria, the federal Canadian Council for Donation and Transplantation recommends: an absence of a pulse, blood pressure and respiration for five minutes, before two physicians pronounce the patient dead and the organs eligible for consideration.
"It's long overdue," George Marcello, organ donation advocate and two-time liver transplant recipient, told CTV Newsnet. "Ontario's the first here but I'm hoping it will spread right across the country."
Marcello created Step by Step, a group committed to increasing organ donor awareness, and has been actively campaigning for donation after cardio-circulatory death for several years.
The council also has criteria for retrieving organs from people who have cardiac arrest after life support ends.
Scientists at the Ottawa Hospital have estimated that if they had been able to retrieve organs from cardiac arrest patients, they would have had access to another 28 kidneys -- a 30 per cent increase -- over an 18-month period.
In Ontario, there are nearly 1,800 patients waiting for an organ transplant. In 2004, 122 of them died.
But while 30,000 people die in Ontario hospitals ever year, only about 1.5 per cent of them meet the brain-dead criteria.
This new move opening the door to eligible cardiac-arrest patients could add hundreds more donors to the pool.
Not all donors, however, would be medically suitable and not all hospitals would be able to do the transplants.
Canada has one of the poorest organ donation rates in the developed world, but recent figures suggest the tide is turning.
The Canadian Institute for Health Information reported last year that the number of transplants in Canada went up 22 per cent between 1994 and 2003. But the number of brain-dead donors remained the same.