With the success of organ transplantation and the declining number of heart beating cadaver donors, 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. 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 adopted 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 liver and lung. The outcome of transplanting a vital organ which fails to function immediately is death of the recipient. The success of transplanting such 'damaged' organs shows how far progress has been made with utilising such donors and why the proportion of transplants has increased so dramatically in recent years (developments have
allowed these programmes to flourish such that in the UK 25% of kidney transplants were from such donors in 2006).
