Connection: Donor Shortage

A shortage of transplant organs has Spokane doctors turning to mechanical hearts and kidney patients turning to their families in order to survive.

Last fall, Sacred Heart Medical Center earned approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to try mechanical hearts on 50 patients around the world. In the past, the “mechanical assist devices” have been used as a bridge between heart failure and a heart transplant.

Mechanical hearts are needed because while 40,000 patients nationally need new hearts, only 2,500 hearts are available, doctors say. Tougher drinking and driving laws, more air bags in cars, and helmet laws for motorcycle riders have exacerbated that shortage, according to Dr. Timothy Icenogle, who runs the heart/lung transplant program at Sacred Heart.

There are six people waiting for hearts at Sacred Heart. Two are on mechanical hearts. All will wait an average of a year for a transplant.

Sacred Heart’s kidney transplant program, the only one between Salt Lake City and Seattle, also has far more demand than organs. Eighty people are on the waiting list today, compared with 50 just two years ago.

When family members can offer a matching kidney, finding a donor is relatively easy. Getting a kidney from someone who is deceased, however, is quite difficult.

There is good news on the local kidney front. Sacred Heart is about to transplant its 500th kidney after 20 years in the business.

And Dr. Robert J. Golden is perfecting a technique that significantly reduces the size of the incision given to a living kidney donor. That cuts the hospital stay in half, reduces the pain killers needed by 90 percent and puts donors back on their feet far faster, Sacred Heart officials say.