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. 2020 Aug;34(8):e13895.
doi: 10.1111/ctr.13895. Epub 2020 May 24.

Cornea donation in Germany: Obtaining consent

Sabrina Schmidt  1 , Ammar Ghouzi  2 , George Petrov  3 , Nicola Hofmann  1 , Martin Boergel  1 , Stephan Urs Sixt  1   3
Affiliations

Cornea donation in Germany: Obtaining consent

Sabrina Schmidt et al. Clin Transplant. 2020 Aug.

Abstract

Tissue donation is important to reverse cornea-related blindness. Unfortunately, the willingness to make a decision concerning organ and tissue donation while still alive remains low despite all efforts. By analyzing anonymized archived data from 25 654 next-of-kin interviews from our database over a period of 5 years (2013-2018), it was found that only 20.8% of all potential cornea donors have declared their own wishes. While still alive, refusal was communicated more often than consent by potential donors. Overall consent rates were 39.2%, with parents and siblings consenting more often than other relatives and females refusing more often than male family members. Personal interviews and interviews via telephone handled by staff known to the family resulted in better consent rates (up to 75.6%) with male interviewers receiving higher consent rates in general. The gender of the approached relatives in relation to a male/female interviewer was of low importance. The results also show that it is important to allow discussion about that topic between family members-the more relatives that were involved the higher the probability of consent.

Keywords: consent; cornea donation; cornea transplantation; tissue donation; tissue transplantation.

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References

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