UCLA study reports efficient way to evaluate organ donations

A UCLA study released Thursday indicated a device attachable to fingers of organ donors who are brain dead can determine the functionality of their liver by detecting the amount of a drug remaining in the bloodstream.

Ali Zarrinpar, the study’s lead researcher, said he thinks using the device could save the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center thousands of dollars in surgery and would help doctors evaluate organ donations more efficiently.

The device is currently used in Europe commercially for detecting the degree of sickness in patients in intensive care units based on their organ functionality, he said.

By shining a light through the fingertip of potential organ donors, the device can detect traces of colored drugs that were injected into their bloodstreams. The device measures how well the liver processes the drug based on the amount of the colored substance left in the bloodstream after a certain amount of time.

The device, however is not currently approved for use in the United States. This is the first time it has been used to attempt to detect the level of liver functionality in organ donors, Zarrinpar added.

Zarrinpar, who is a UCLA liver transplant surgeon, said he was motivated to conduct the study after traveling to different hospitals to evaluate potential organ donations that he discovered were unusable.

He added that more than 15,000 patients are on the waiting list for liver transplants at UCLA, but only about 6,000 liver donations are available every year.

“If we had some objective way of measuring (organ function), we could expand the pool of donations,” Zarrinpar said. “Getting more quantitative information about how good organs are would be a huge benefit to the field.”

Currently, donors with good medical records are operated on to fully evaluate their liver functionality. However, Zarrinpar said he thinks this evaluation process is sometimes fallible. In his work, he has found organs that were initially thought to be healthy and still unsuitable for transplants.

Zarrinpar said he thinks this device can reduce the costs to the hospital for the evaluation process. The device could potentially eliminate the need to operate on potential donors to determine organ health.

He added he thinks the device can be approved fairly easily after regulatory paperwork, since it is a minimal risk device, but it is not clear how long it will take to be approved.

Zarrinpar is currently working with OneLegacy, the organization that piloted the research, to discuss a larger study that would confirm these findings.

Compiled by Alejandra Reyes-Velarde, Bruin reporter.

Published by Alejandra Reyes-Velarde

Reyes is the Daily Bruin's News editor and an Editorial Board member. Previously, she was the Science & Health editor covering research, the UCLA health system and graduate school news. She also writes Arts & Entertainment stories and photographs for the Bruin.

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