Organ Donation and Transplantation after Cardiac Death [Hardcover]

With the success of organ transplantation and the declining number of heart beating cadaver doctors, the number of patients awaiting a transplant continues to rise. This means that alternative sources of donors have been sought, including donors after cardiac death. Such donors sustain rapid damage to their organs due to ischaemia, and as a consequence, some organs do not work initially and some none at all. The proportion of such transplants has increased dramatically in recent years--25% of kidney transplants in the UK were from such donors in 2006, highlighting how much progress has been made.

Written by international experts, this book lays out the moral, legal, and ethical restraints to using such donors for organ transplant together with the techniques that have been adpoted to improve their outcome. The different approaches and results of renal transplant according to country are covered together with the procedures and outcomes adopted to use other organs, notably the liver and lungs.

It certainly achieves the worthy objective of describing the various techniques available to allow for successful transplantation from donors following cardiac death...The historical aspects of organ preservation and donation after cardiac death are covered well. Individual chapters detail utilization of various organs from non-heart beating donors. Highlighted are the various options in organ preservation pre-recovery and determination of organ suitability....unique... --Doody's

David Talbot has been a transplant surgeon in Newcastle since 1995 having trained in the north east of England and Birmingham. His early research interests were antibody detection using flow cytometry and later mainly non heart beating donation. His current clinical practice includes access surgery, renal and liver transplantation, live donor and paediatric renal transplantation. Dr. D'Alessandro received his BS from Gannon University in 1976 and his MD from HahnemlÃ