SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – With around 17 people dying every day while waiting for an organ transplant, and with fatty liver disease on the rise, living organ donors are needed more than ever.
What does it take to be a living organ donor? Dr. John P. Roberts, an award-winning organ transplant surgeon at UCSF, joined KCBS Radio’s Alice Wertz on “As Prescribed” to explain.
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“They have to be healthy,” he said. “They have to obviously be motivated and they have to be able to understand, you know, that they’re having a big operation… that’s this is an important aspect of the process.”
Most living organ donors provide patients in need with kidneys or a liver, said Roberts. Over the past 15 to 20 years, an uptick in obesity has contributed to an increase in fatty liver disease in the U.S, creating a greater need for liver donations.
“There’s a high percentage of people in the United States who have fat in their liver,” said Roberts. “And for some of those people that fat starts to cause inflammation in the liver, and then causes scarring of the liver,” and cirrhosis. At that point, many need a liver transplant.
Once a patient does need a liver transplant, the process to get a donation can be difficult. If organs do not come from living donors, they come from deceased donors. Patients waiting for a transplant are ranked by how sick they are, and some die while waiting.
According to UCSF, there are more than 17,000 patients on the liver waiting list in the U.S., but only enough donated livers to perform about 5,000 transplants per year. Approximately 1,700 patients die each year while on liver waiting list.
Living donors can help patients avoid this process, and avoid the risk of death.
“What happens is… we take out part of the donor’s liver and then put it into the recipient,” Roberts explained – around 40% to 60% of it, per UCSF. “The liver is an amazing organ in that it can regenerate itself and our livers are probably regenerating all the time as we, you know, go through life.”
He said that regeneration can begin within hours, both for the donor and the recipient. Donors must have compatible blood types with recipients in order to provide them with a donation. They typically stay in the hospital for around a week and recover in around eight weeks, while it can take the recipient around six months to a year to recover.
For those who donate a kidney, the organ will not grow back. However, the body can function with one kidney. To compensate for the loss, the remaining kidney “enlarges slightly and performs the same amount of work as the previous pair,” according to UCSF.
In both cases, donors should know they are taking a risk to save a life.
“Those people need to decide that… ‘I’m willing to take this risk in order to… save the life of my loved one,’” said Roberts. Learn more here.
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