Reply to Should a child with an intellectual disability be denied an organ transplant?

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[quote=Anonymous]A few clarifications:
1. At most centers there is no upper age limit for kidney transplant recipients, however certainly as you approach 80+, any life years gained do not exceed what you might be expected to live anyway.
2. You cannot "slice" up a kidney to make it smaller for a child.  You CAN do that with a liver.  The protocol at Stanford is somewhat experimental and specific to that hospital.  Most hospitals will not be able to put a full size adult kidney into a very small child.
3. Mental competence is used in every single selection of organ recipients.  Every potential candidate is seen by a social worker, financial counselor, and possibly a psychiatrist.  If a patient (directed more towards adults here) is unable to understand and reliably take their medications and come in for follow-up tests and appts, then they may be denied a transplant.
4. People with end-stage diseases are turned down for transplant all the time.  A person with cancer would never be given an organ until a sufficient time after remission is achieved.  Organs are too scarce to put into someone who will not get maximum gain from it.  Even if a living donor came forward for one of these patients, the hospital would not go forward.
5. Other conditions such as seizures and brain injuries can make it much, much harder to take immunosuppressive medications after transplant.
6. And finally... unfortunately all transplant centers are monitored constantly and results put into a system called the SRTR.  It is public knowledge - you can look up the graft and patient survivals for every center.  While this may seem good at first because it assures you of the quality of a center, it makes it impossible for centers to accept too many high risk patients.  It is incredibly easy to fall below the statistical norm.  If that happens, your center goes on probation or is closed down.  Therefore, although doctors may want to do any patient that walks through the doors, it is absolutely impossible for them to accept cases with small chances of long term success.

I'm actually really unsure of how I feel about this specific case, but there were too many inaccurate statements here for me not to comment!
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