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Lung donors can be living or deceased, with most transplants coming from cadaveric donation. Living donation requires two donors due to the five lobes of the lungs. Donors must meet certain qualifications, and while living donation has advantages such as shorter wait times and higher success rates, it can also affect the donor’s quality of life.
A lung donor is someone who donates a part of their lung to someone whose lungs are failing and need new ones to survive. There are two types of donors, a living donor and a deceased donor. Living lung donation is rare because the recipient of the lungs will need two healthy donors for the transplant. Most lung transplants occur through people who have consented to be organ donors after their death or cadaver donation.
Lungs allow humans to breathe. When a person has lung disease, their ability to breathe in air is impaired, making breathing difficult. A lung transplant is usually needed when a patient has reached end-stage lung disease and has no other available treatment options. The patient will go through tests to see if he or she is a candidate for a transplant. If found suitable for the procedure, he will be placed on a waiting list and usually begins a search for a lung donor with the same blood type and body size.
Cadaveric lung donation is the usual way most transplant recipients get their new lungs. Before a person dies, he can choose to become a lung donor. Sometimes a family may decide to donate a loved one’s organs if they didn’t make the decision before the death. The advantage of a cadaver donation is that the recipient can get the transplant through a person. The downsides are that someone has to die to supply the new lungs, and the wait for suitable organs can take years.
The other lung donor option is a living donor. Human lungs have five lobes: three lobes in the right lung, two in the left. To have a living donor transplant, the recipient will need two donors, one donor to give the lobes for the right lung and one to donate for the left. Finding two people who are a match can be difficult, which is why live lung donation is rare.
A person who wishes to become a living lung donor must meet certain qualifications. Donors should be over 18 and under 60. They should be nonsmokers with no history of excessive smoking, healthy with no family history of lung disease, and mentally capable of making the decision to donate. Rigorous testing is usually done to ensure these qualifications are met.
The advantage of a living donor lung transplant is that the recipient doesn’t have to wait as long as if they were on a waiting list, and living donor transplants usually have a higher success rate since matches are almost always better of a cadaveric donation. The disadvantage is usually the donor’s quality of life is affected. The missing portion of the lung can reduce the donor’s oxygen intake, which can make physical activities that were easy before the transplant a little more difficult. Recovery time for a donor lung can also be a long process, with up to nine days in the hospital after the operation and up to three years of post-surgical monitoring by a doctor.
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