Tiny donors
There are currently more than 200,000 individuals in the United States on a waiting list for an organ transplant, and nearly 100 are under 1 year of age. In the first study to look at the potential for organ donation from dying infants in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) setting, Harvard researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), Children’s Hospital Boston, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center demonstrated that an estimated 8 percent of NICU mortalities would be eligible for organ donation after cardiac death. “A key motivation behind this study was our inability to act, under current guidelines, on the direct requests from parents faced with the loss of their newborn, who turned to us wanting their child to be an organ donor,” said Richard Parad, a neonatologist in the Newborn Medicine Department at BWH and associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School (HMS). Parad explained that some parents...