What do we know about eligible organ donors? Analysis of data from a local Registry.

Background: The imbalance between supply and demand for organ donations remains a hot topic for international debate. Brain-dead organ donors (DBDs) constitute the majority of organ donations in Poland.

Objectives: To identify the factors that guided intensivists in qualifying a brain-dead patient as a potential organ donor, and whether the factors that significantly influenced the decision to qualify constituted an actual contraindication.

Material and methods: We performed a retrospective study based on data from the Silesian ICU Registry from 2010-2020 and publicly available information from Poltransplant. We compared the demographic and clinical characteristics of patients diagnosed with brain death who were identified as eligible and ineligible organ donors.

Results: Out of 25,465 patients enrolled in the Silesian ICU Registry, brain death was diagnosed in 385 (1.51%) study participants, and 61 of the records were excluded due to data incompleteness. In the remaining group (n = 324), there were 201 men and 123 women. Of them, only 180 study participants were reported as eligible donors (55.5%). Six patients had absolute contraindications to organ donation.

Conclusions: A relatively small number of patients diagnosed with brain death were qualified by intensivists as eligible organ donors, with a limited number of medical factors influencing this decision. This means that other non-medical factors may affect the qualification of DBDs for organ procurement.