Fred Tomaselli, “Drawing After Utah Saint” (1999).Credit…Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York
In medicine there are only two reasons a person can be declared dead: Either the heart has stopped [circulatory death] or the brain has ceased to function, even if the heart is still beating….
[Yet,] an estimated 15 people die in this country every day waiting for a transplant. We need to figure out how to obtain more healthy organs from donors while maintaining strict ethical standards….
[E]ven a few minutes of a stopped heart often results in damage to the organs. This deprives potential recipients of healthy organs and thwarts the wishes of donors to have their organs used to help others….
Fortunately, there is a relatively new method that can improve the efficacy of donation after circulatory death. In this procedure, which is called normothermic regional perfusion, doctors take an irreversibly comatose donor off life support long enough to determine that the heart has stopped beating permanently — but then the donor is placed on a machine that circulates oxygen-rich blood through the body to preserve organ function. Donor organs obtained through this procedure, which is used widely in Europe and increasingly in the United States, tend to be much healthier.
Source: New York Times