Demand for donor organs for transplant is high. Someone is added to the national transplant waitlist every 10 minutes, according to UNOS, and an estimated 20 people die every day waiting for a transplant.

Deceased donors save thousands of lives each year, as four out of five donated organs come from deceased donors. Now, an increasing number of organs are coming from donors who died from drug overdoses.

Drug overdose deaths, particularly opioid overdose deaths, continue to rise. Drug overdoses claimed the lives of 63,632 Americans in 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Accepting organs from these donors would help reduce the transplant waitlist, but some doctors may be reluctant to use them out of concern for poor outcomes.

An April 2018 study showed that deaths associated with drug overdoses in the U.S. has caused a surge in organ donations. The researchers in that study expressed concern that infection risk behaviors in that donor group could lead to the discard of the donated organs.

In a new study, researchers addressed some of those concerns by investigating the effect of drug intoxication-related deaths on solid organ donation and the outcomes of those transplantations.

The Drug-Intoxication Epidemic and Solid-Organ Transplantation

The study authors had three objectives. First, they wanted to establish the cause of the steep rise in organ donation over the past 17 years, and over the past five years in particular.

The second objective was to determine whether the causes of organ donation increases are the same in the U.S. and Europe. Lastly, they wanted to examine the outcome a year after transplantation with organs from donors who died from drug intoxication.

The research team analyzed data from a 17-year period, spanning 2000 to 2016, in the U.S. and Eurotransplant. Eurotransplant is an organization that encourages the exchange of organs between eight EU member states and other organ exchange organizations.

The scientists noted a significant rise in the proportion of drug overdose donors, which increased from 1.2 percent in 2000 to 13.7 percent in 2016. This increase in donors from drug overdoses accounted for much of the rise in organ transplant activity in the previous five years.

The researchers did not note a significant change in the proportion of Eurotransplant drug intoxication as the cause of donor death, nor was there a remarkable change in the overall number of organ donors there.

To evaluate outcomes of using these organs, the research team looked at the survival rates of 2,360 patients after receiving a donated heart or lung. They chose patients who received organs from these donors because these organs are most likely to incur damage from reduced oxygen supply during an overdose.

They compared the one-year survival rates of heart or lung transplant recipients of donors who died from overdoses and recipients of organs from those who died from blunt head injury and other causes. They did not see a significant difference in survival rates between recipients receiving organs from drug overdose donors and those receiving organs from blunt head injury donors.

In fact, the results of the organ transplant were similar between donors who died from drug intoxication and those who died from other causes.

"The US data indicate that survival among recipients of allografts from donors who died from drug intoxication is similar to survival among recipients from donors who died from other causes," write the authors.

The team published their research letter in the New England Journal of Medicine.