US Throwing Away 3,500 Donated Kidneys Every Year

93,000 people are currently on the United States transplant list desperately waiting for a kidney and 5,000 people – approximately 12 a day – die without ever getting one. However, at least 3,500 donated kidneys are disposed of every year, according to a study published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday.

Between 2004 and 2014, 156,089 kidneys were donated from deceased donors, but only 128,102 were transplanted. This means that in 10 years 27,987 kidneys (more than 17% of those donated) were discarded. And this number continued to increase, according to the researchers: in 2016, 3,621 kidneys (about 20%) were discarded. This could be contributed to the fact that American doctors are less willing than doctors of other countries to use kidneys from older patients or from those that had hypertension or diabetes.

A reason for this hesitation by doctors is “intense regulatory scrutiny of US transplant programs, which may lose credentials if their one-year death and graft failure outcomes exceed predicted outcomes.” So if the donated organ is not in pristine condition, transplant centers may not want to risk their credentials. Many of the discarded kidneys are in fact unusable, such as those in bad shape or had a negative biopsy. But a study by the National Kidney Foundation in 2016 found that as many as 50% of discarded deemed unfit could have in fact been transplanted.

Patients with kidney disease currently cost the government $114 billion each year, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar stated, “That is one-fifth the spending of all Medicare dollars.”

See Jen Christensen, The US is Throwing Away at Least 3,500 Donated Kidneys Every Year, Study Finds, CNN, August 26, 2019.