[Spirit Dancer]

ADVANTAGES OF LIVE DONORS
Organs from living donors offer many potential advantages
over organs from brain-dead donors. The most important
advantages of live donation are that it optimizes
the timing of transplantation and frees patients from the
waiting list. These factors have become especially helpful
for patients who are disadvantaged by the cadaver organ
allocation scheme, including patients with tumors, cholestatic
diseases, or blood type O, as well as those who are
retransplantation candidates.
Preservation time is minimal in live donor transplants,
so there is significantly less ischemic damage to
the liver. Live donors are by definition healthy, and
therefore the quality of the donated liver is much better.
Brain death results in many adverse pathophysiologic
effects that damage the liver. Perhaps most importantly,
live donor transplantation increases the global
pool of transplantable organs, allowing more people to
benefit from this potentially life-saving therapy.
DISADVANTAGES OF LIVE DONORS
There are, however, a number of disadvantages to live
donor transplantation which must be considered carefully.
The donor, a perfectly healthy volunteer, faces
unequivocal risks of morbidity and even mortality
which put the procedure at odds with the very basic
tenets of medicine and the oath that all physicians
pledge to keep: Primum non nocere – First, cause no
harm. The risk of death for donors of a left lateral segment
or a left lobe is estimated to be approximately
0.1%, whereas the risk for donors of a right lobe is
estimated to be approximately 0.4 to 0.5%.25