Organ donation after resuscitation from cardiac arrest

We compared the characteristics and outcomes of post-arrest donors to those of other donors, described the proportion of post-arrest decedents who donated, and compared their characteristics to post-arrest decedents who did not donate.

We performed a retrospective cohort study including patients who died at a single academic medical center from January 1, 2010 to February 28, 2019. We linked our registry of consecutive post-arrest patients to donation-related data from the Center for Organ Procurement and Recovery (CORE). We used data from CORE to identify donor eligibility, first person designation, family approaches to seek consent for donation, and approach outcomes. We determined number of organs procured and number transplanted, stratified by donor type (brain death donors (BDD) vs donors after circulatory determination of death (DCD)).

There were 12,130 decedents; 1525 (13%) were resuscitated from cardiac arrest. CORE staff approached families of 836 (260 (31%) post-arrest, 576 (69%) not post-arrest) to request donation. Post-arrest patients and families were more likely to authorize donation (172/260 (66%) vs 331/576 (57%), P = 0.02), and more likely to be DCDs (50/146 (34%) vs 55/289 (19%), P < 0.001). Overall, 4.1 ± 1.5 organs were procured and 2.9 ± 1.9 transplanted per BDD, which did not differ by post-arrest status, 3.2 ± 1.2 organs were procured and 1.8 ± 1.1 transplanted per DCD. Number of organs transplanted per DCD did not differ by post-arrest status. Unfavorable arrest characteristics were more common among post-arrest organ donors compared to non-donors.

Patients resuscitated from cardiac arrest with irrecoverable brain injury have excellent potential to become organ donors.