RIYADH – Dr. Faisal Abdulraheem Shaheen, Director General of the Saudi Center for Organ Transplantation (SCOT) said the center has provided 9,281 viable organs to end-stage organ failure patients from deceased and living donors. Shaheen said the total number of kidney transplants since the founding of SCOT in 1993 reached 7,201 including 2,349 transplants for donated kidneys following death, and 4,852 operations for donated kidneys from living persons of which 553 kidneys were transplanted. These figures represent the latest statistics for SCOT up to the end of 2011, Al-Watan newspaper reported recently. Shaheen said the total number of liver transplants reached 1,094 operations. Of these, 621 were operations for livers donated following death and 473 were operations for donated kidneys from living relatives. Aside from these, the center recorded 206 heart transplants, 647 cornea transplants, 19 pancreas transplants, 70 lung transplants and 63 bone marrow transplants. Shaheen said SCOT has increased its efforts to follow up cases where patients are declared brain dead. “By increasing the frequency of calls made to Intensive Care Units in the Kingdom's hospitals, we learn about cases where patients are declared brain dead. This allows us to contact families and request that the patient's organs be donated,” he said. Patients are declared brain dead after two clinical tests are conducted with a minimum interval of six hours. An electroencephalograph (EEG) is also carried out to ensure that there is no electrical activity in the cerebral cortex for a period of 30 minutes. Doctors can also conduct a further test to ensure that there is no blood flow in the brain's arteries. Once conducted, these clinical procedures are signed by two experienced doctors. Shaheen said the number of patients who were declared clinically brain dead reached 95 in 2011 while the total number of cases reported to the center reached 710. The male-female ratio remained the same at 4 to 1 and 66 percent of the cases involved victims below 40 years of age. Brain concussions formed 47 percent of the causes of brain death while non-disease cerebrovascular accidents formed the remaining 53 percent. Shaheen said SCOT has documented 385 cases of brain death. Out of these, families were met by officials 309 times. He said the center managed to obtain the consent of the families in 30 percent of the cases while families' refusal to give consent formed 70 percent of the total number of cases where the families were met. In 78 percent of the cases when families gave their consent, the organs were removed. He drew attention to the fact that all the reported cases were followed up with the ICUs in the Kingdom's hospitals to ensure that cardiovascular functions had stopped and death has been declared according to the regulations. — SG
