How many kidney transplants have there been in the last 20 years?

[okarol]

Can you guess the total from 1988 to 2008? Do you know how many were done in 1988 as compared to 2007?

Kitkatz and I were discussing transplant statistics and I became interested to know the answer. You can look this info up online.

Here's the data from Organ Procurement and Transplant Network, operated by UNOS.

                                    1988                    2007               Total 1988 to present

All Donor Types               8,878                  15,289                249,434
Deceased Donor               7,061                   9,721                163,256
Living Donor                   1,817                   5,568                  86,178

It's amazing what a difference living donors have made, especially when you consider that each deceased donor usually provides 2 kidneys.
Sadly the wait list is growing at a much greater speed than the available donors, deceased or living. Currently about 80,000 people are waiting for a kidney transplant in the United States.
You can build a report to see data in various ways http://www.optn.org/latestData/viewDataReports.asp

[tamara]

Re: How many kidney transplants have there been in the last 20 years?


NOT ENOUGH !  

[Wattle]

Isn't that only the USA statistics?

[okarol]

Yes - UNOS is a US agency. Does Australia have a website where you can retrieve data?

[Wattle]

Yes - UNOS is a US agency. Does Australia have a website where you can retrieve data?

I am ashamed to say that our donor rates are VERY poor. Our Transplant success rates are great .... we just need more donors.

http://www.anzdata.org.au/index_ANZOD.htm

[okarol]

Great, thanks!
I need to look closer, cannot find if they list living vs deceased. In the 2000 data it only shows kidney recipients.

[stauffenberg]

When you consider that every year in the US about four million people die, meaning that theoretically eight million kidneys become available for transplant, the fact that of these, only 15,000 are actually transplanted, shows how vast the wastage of the supply is.  Of course much of that cannot be helped, since many people die with diseases that prohibit their organs from being used for transplant, or die in such a way that they cannot be kept artificially 'alive' on special apparatus in the hospital to permit their organs to be harvested, but still, many usable kidneys are lost because the average person could care less what happens to kidney patients.  It has been estimated that if all medically available kidneys could be transplanted, the number of cadaver organs for transplant would triple.