The brain-dead donor: An anaesthesiologist's perspective

Brain death, cardiac death, and the dead donor rule.

Management of the heartbeating brain-dead organ donor.

The main factor limiting organ donation is the availability of suitable donors and organs. Currently, most transplants follow multiple organ retrieval from heartbeating brain-dead organ donors. However, brain death is often associated with marked physiological instability, which, if not managed, can lead to deterioration in organ function before retrieval. In some cases, this prevents successfu...

Reevaluating the dead donor rule.

The dead donor rule justifies current practice in organ procurement for transplantation and states that organ donors must be dead prior to donation. The majority of organ donors are diagnosed as having suffered brain death and hence are declared dead by neurological criteria. However, a significant amount of unrest in both the philosophical and the medical literature has surfaced since this pra...

Brain dead donor kidneys are immunologically active: is intervention justified?

The improvement in the field of kidney transplantation, during the last decades, has brought kindey transplantation to the top of patient preference as the best kidney replacement therapy. The use of marginal kidney grafts, which are highly immunogenic has become common practice because of lack of kidney donors. Inflammatory activity in the kidneys after brain death is an ongoing phenomenon. Th...

The dead donor rule and organ transplantation.

674 S ince its inception, organ trans-plantation has been guided by the overarching ethical requirement known as the dead donor rule, which simply states that patients must be declared dead before the removal of any vital organs for transplantation. Before the development of modern critical care, the diagnosis of death was relatively straightforward: patients were dead when they were cold, blue...