• Nephrol. Dial. Transplant. · Apr 2004

    Variation in cadaveric organ donor rates in the UK.

    • Jeremy Wight, Michael Jakubovic, Stephen Walters, Ravi Maheswaran, Paul White, and Veronica Lennon.
    • Section of Public Health Medicine, ScHARR, University of Sheffield, Regent Court, 30 Regent Street, Sheffield S1 4DA, UK. j.p.wight@sheffield.ac.uk
    • Nephrol. Dial. Transplant. 2004 Apr 1; 19 (4): 963-8.

    BackgroundConsiderable variation exists in the organ donation rate between kidney retrieval areas (KRAs) within the UK. The causes for this are unknown. This study examines whether or not observed variations are correlated with various possible explanatory factors.MethodsA geographical study involving Poisson regression analysis was carried out of all 21 KRAs in the UK in 1999 and 2000, with donor rate as dependent variable, and the following independent variables: road traffic accident, intracerebral haemorrhage and other trauma death rates; intensive care unit (ICU) bed numbers; co-location of transplant and neurosurgical units; population ethnicity; proportion of the population on the organ donor register; transplant coordinator numbers; and transplant unit numbers. Main outcome measures were: donor rate in each KRA; strength of association between independent and dependent variables; and magnitude of changes in the donor rate associated with changes in independent variables.ResultsThe donor rate varied between eight and 27.4 donors per million population per year. There was an association between donor rate and general ICU bed numbers (more beds associated with a higher donor rate), but this was of borderline statistical significance (P = 0.065). However, the donor rate was negatively associated (P = 0.02) with neurosurgical ICU bed numbers (more beds, fewer donors) and the proportion of the population from minority ethnic communities. There was no statistically significant association with the other independent variables.ConclusionsThere is significant variation in the organ donor rate between different parts of the UK. More research is needed to explore the counter-intuitive association between neurosurgical ICU beds and donations, and to determine the remaining causes of the observed variation.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…