Corneal transplantation: the fine line between donor shortage and tissue quality

The aim was to assess, whether there was an association between recorded donor characteristics such as endothelial cell density (ECD), age and sex, and endothelial graft failure and rejection. In response to this problem, England recently switched to an opt-out organ donation policy aiming to close...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:BMJ open ophthalmology Vol. 7; no. 1; p. e001046
Main Authors: Steger, Bernhard, Kaye, Stephen B, Romano, Vito
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: England BMJ Publishing Group Ltd 01.08.2022
BMJ Publishing Group LTD
BMJ Publishing Group
Subjects:
Age
Blood & organ donations
Cornea
Corneal Transplantation
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
Editorial
Eye surgery
Humans
Ophthalmology
Pandemics
Shortages
Tissue Donors
United Kingdom > UK
United States > US
Italy
Cornea
ISSN:2397-3269, 2397-3269
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The aim was to assess, whether there was an association between recorded donor characteristics such as endothelial cell density (ECD), age and sex, and endothelial graft failure and rejection. In response to this problem, England recently switched to an opt-out organ donation policy aiming to close the annual gap of approximately 1500 corneas, despite importing tissue from the USA and European Union (EU).10 However, the effect of this step remains to be quantified, being temporarily masked by a relative donor shortage due to Brexit and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which significantly affected eye bank donor cornea procurement on a global scale.11 In addition, compared with other eye bank systems, such as in USA or Italy, the postmortem times such as death to retrieval, retrieval to processing and processing to issue may be skewed to being longer in the UK. The findings reported in this issue should push eye banks to try to keep improving postmortem times, and also to push basic science research into looking for novel, alternative ways to measure the true heath of endothelial cells as well as improving their health to increase graft survival.
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ISSN:2397-3269
2397-3269
DOI:10.1136/bmjophth-2022-001046