What is Organ Transplantation?
Organ transplantation is the transplantation of all or part of the organ taken from a living donor or brain dead people instead of the organ that cannot perform its function in the body.
Which organs and tissues can be transplanted?
Today, kidney, liver, bone marrow, heart and pancreas are the most commonly transplanted organs. Although lung and small intestine transplants are increasing, success rates are not at the desired level. Tissues such as bone, tendon and ligament can give freedom of movement to people who have lost tissue due to trauma or cancer. Cornea transplantation allows patients who are blind due to the destruction of this tissue to see, and skin transplantation allows patients whose wounds do not heal after burns to close their wounds. Heart valves can be transplanted to patients with congenital heart valve disease or those whose valves have deteriorated.
From whom is organ transplantation performed?
The source of organs to be used in organ transplants are living donors and cadaveric donors. In our country, the supply of organs from cadavers is quite low compared to the supply of organs from living donors, unlike in western countries.
Organs from cadavers are obtained by harvesting the organs after the brain death of the family or the benefactors who donated their organs before their death.
In living organ transplantation, relatives and kinsmen up to the 4th degree can be used as donors.
- 1st degree relatives: mother, father, child
- 2nd degree relatives: siblings, grandparents, grandchildren
- 3rd degree relatives: uncle, aunt, uncle, aunt, niece, nephew
- 4th degree relatives: Children of 3rd degree relatives
In unrelated organ transplants, recipients and donors are evaluated by the ethics committees established within the Provincial Health Directorate. If it is approved by the ethics committee that there are no medical, ethical and legal problems between the persons, they are accepted for transplantation.
About Organ Transplantation
Today, there are many organ transplant centers, but as you know, not only in Turkey, but even in the most developed countries of the world, patients unfortunately still lose their lives due to chronic organ diseases that can be treated with transplantation. Although the point reached is incomparable with the past, organ donation rates are far below what they should be, and in some regions of our country, these rates are unacceptably low. For these reasons, we all have to do our part. We must tirelessly inform our people, our patients and even health personnel working in other fields, emphasize the importance of the issue in every environment and ensure that it does not fall off the agenda.
In the meantime, it should not be forgotten that our main goal should be to increase the rate of organ donation in medically deceased people. Patients whose lives or health depend on tissue and organ transplants such as heart and cornea, which cannot be obtained from living donors, have no other choice. When adequate organ donation rates are reached, the need to use healthy people as donors for kidney and liver transplants will automatically disappear. However, until this target is reached, the use of living donors is inevitable. The point that should never be compromised while doing this is ethical values. Especially in organ transplants using living donors, completely healthy people with no medical problems are taken into surgery to remove one of their kidneys or part of their liver. The primary goal in these operations should be to ensure that the donor’s health is never put at risk. Apart from this, since organ transplantation is a field that is extremely open to abuse, the correct application of ethical and legal rules should be meticulously evaluated.