Complex Kidney Donations Provide Necessary Transplants for Some

Including an anatomical gift in your estate plan is one way to help the organ donation shortage. A more immediate solution is a “Daisy Chain,” which has been used in the context of kidney donations:

One person — call him Abe — wants to donate a kidney to Bob, but they’re not a good match. In the next town over, Carlos wants to donate a kidney to David. Also, alas, not a good match.

But, as it happens, Abe is a match for David, and Carlos is a match for Bob. So each donor can give his kidney to a stranger, in exchange for the knowledge that his own friend will get a kidney.

That basic model (known in its simplest form as paired donation) can be expanded to include lots of intermediaries — the full daisy chain — when a simple paired swap doesn’t suffice.

This kind of thing has been around for a while now, but it seems to be getting more common — and more complex — lately. A chain of 10 transplantations carried out over eight months was described last year in the New England Journal of Medicine. And late last year, doctors at two Washington hospitals did a chain of 13 transplants over six days.

Jacob Goldstein, One More Way to Increase the Number of Kidney Donors, WSJ Health Blog, Jan. 9, 2010.