AARP - Segunda Juventud - Organ Donation

Not Too Old to Give—or Receive

By Barbara Basler and Chad Hudnall
August 2006

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Dr. Huerta: Minority Organ Donation

Winning the Waiting Game

Organ Donation Facts
A common misconception about organ transplants is that they’re only for the young—or certainly not for anyone beyond middle age. The truth is that more older Americans are becoming organ recipients—and donors.

A study published in the March/April Journal of Cardiac Surgery found that patients who received hearts from donors 50 and older fared just as well as patients who got hearts from younger donors. Long-term survival rates—10 years after the transplant—were nearly identical among all the patients.

At the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston, transplant surgeons have been pushing the envelope with heart transplants from older donors to older recipients. Frank Smart, M.D., now chief of cardiology at Morristown Memorial Hospital in New Jersey, says his work at St. Luke’s increasingly involved transplant patients in their mid- to late 70s, and they had a good survival rate.