TEHRAN -- Six million Iranians hold organ donation cards, said Ali Nobakht, member of the health committee of the parliament (Majlis), adding although the number has increased over the past years, but there is still more work to be done.

Thanks to infrastructure provided, today 70 percent of Iranians can register for organ donation cards, he added, ISNA reported on Monday.

He made the remarks during an event held on the occasion of the National Day of Organ Donation, which was celebrated on May 20 at the Shahid Beheshti University.

According to statistics, about 90 percent of the families of brain death patients who own the cards agree with organ donation, while it is a hard procedure when the patient do not own the card, he said.

Each brain death patient saves six lives

Meanwhile, Ali Akbar Velayati, the head of Masih Daneshvari Hospital, a center for tuberculosis and lung diseases, said during the event that each brain death patient saves six lives but unfortunately people do not know much about this fact.

Lung transplantation, heart transplantation, simultaneous heart-lung and heart-kidney transplantation for the first time in Iran, transplantation of an artificial biologic trachea, and construction of bio artificial liver are some of the achievements of the hospital.

Unfortunately, each 2 to 5 hours, one Iranian, who is on the list of organ transplantation and is suffering from advanced cardiovascular tuberculosis disease, kidney failure or liver disease, lose his or her life, he lamented.

With disagreement of family members of a brain death patient, the life chance of one to six other Iranians is lost, he added.

A total of 1706 organ donations have been done during the past Iranian calendar year 1397 (ended on March 20, 2019), he announced.

One third of transplantation operations were done at Masih Daneshvari Hospital, however, the transmission of organs to other parts of the country is done as soon as possible, he added.

About 1000 lung transplantations and 250 heart transplant surgeries have been done at the hospital, he announced.

‘Organ donation rate grows 60-fold in 18 years’

In early February, the transplantation and treatment of diseases department at the Ministry of Health announced that organ donation rate has increased by 60 times over the past 18 years.

Although, Iran ranks 26 in organ donation in the world, it can claim better ranks given some plans being implemented in this regard, he highlighted, adding, we will achieve better results certainly by the next year (March 2019-March 2020), as many barriers have been removed last year.

In the past, kidneys were mostly removed from a healthy donor and surgically placed in an individual with kidney failure, while currently some 57 percent of kidney donor transplants in the country are among brain-dead donors.

Nationally, over 8,600 people are on the transplant waiting list for kidney, which is hoped to face a decline as soon as possible.

If Iran move ahead with the current trend, it will achieve 45 percent increase by the Iranian calendar year 1404 (March 2025-March 2026).

Automated database of organ transplantation

In mid-February head of the transplantation and treatment of diseases department at the Ministry of Health Mehdi Shadnoosh said that the first stage of establishing an automated database of organ transplantation would begin on March 1st. The second stage of this project will begin in May and the aim is for the whole system of organ donation to be automated in time, he added.

The database will include all the information about the people who are awaiting an organ donation; then the system will automatically rank them based on their needs and whenever a new organ is found the top ten on the waiting list will be introduced, he further explained.

Organ donation, how and why?

Organ transplantation is one of the great advances in modern medicine, but unfortunately, the need for organ donors is much greater than the number of people who actually donate.

According to the figures revealed by International Registry in Organ Donation and Transplantation (IRODaT) Spain leads the world in organ donation.

Figures published for 2017 reveal that 2,183 people in Spain became organ donors last year after they died. That’s 46.9 per million people in the population (pmp) – a standard way of measuring the rate of donation in a country, The Independent reported in July 2018.

According to the data published on IRODaT by the end of 2017 Iran’s per million population of actual deceased organ donors was 11.43. In 1996 Iran’s per million population of actual deceased organ donors was 0.1, which compared to the current pmp shows a great increase.

Some 5,000 people die of brain death annually in Iran, out of 3,000 brain deaths reported last year being qualified to be organ donors, only 926 donated their organs.

SB/MG