The Nonlinear Library EA - Should I donate my kidney or part of my liver? by Bob Jacobs
Apr 11, 2024
01:58
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Should I donate my kidney or part of my liver?, published by Bob Jacobs on April 11, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
I've been talking with my hospital about donating my kidney and it's been going rather well. However, one piece of unfortunate news they told me is that I can't donate both my kidney and a piece of my liver (and that I can't do this in another hospital either). So people that want to donate are faced with a dilemma of which one to choose. I asked the doctors whether they had literature on this, but unfortunately they didn't know of any that compared the two.
I've looked at some papers, and the side effects for both kidney donation and liver donation seem to be negligible for the donor (way less than 1 QALY).
That leaves us with the question of what has the bigger impact for the recipient.
I've looked for papers that compared them directly, but couldn't really find anything.
It seems like for kidneys:
The average donation buys the recipient about 5 - 7 extra years of life (beyond the counterfactual of dialysis). It also improves quality of life from about 70% of the healthy average to about 90%. Non-directed kidney donations can also help the organ bank solve allocation problems around matching donors and recipients of different blood types.
Most sources say that an average donated kidney creates a "chain" of about five other donations, but most of these other donations would have happened anyway; the value over counterfactual is about 0.5 to 1 extra transplant completed before the intended recipient dies from waiting too long. So in total, a donation produces about 10 - 20 extra quality-adjusted life years.
Liver donation seems to generate less QALYs, though the estimates vary a lot.
So I'm currently leaning towards donating my kidney. Does anyone have any more insights into this? Does anyone know of an analysis that compares the two? (If someone is/wants to write one, I'd be glad to help) Please share your thoughts.
Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org
I've been talking with my hospital about donating my kidney and it's been going rather well. However, one piece of unfortunate news they told me is that I can't donate both my kidney and a piece of my liver (and that I can't do this in another hospital either). So people that want to donate are faced with a dilemma of which one to choose. I asked the doctors whether they had literature on this, but unfortunately they didn't know of any that compared the two.
I've looked at some papers, and the side effects for both kidney donation and liver donation seem to be negligible for the donor (way less than 1 QALY).
That leaves us with the question of what has the bigger impact for the recipient.
I've looked for papers that compared them directly, but couldn't really find anything.
It seems like for kidneys:
The average donation buys the recipient about 5 - 7 extra years of life (beyond the counterfactual of dialysis). It also improves quality of life from about 70% of the healthy average to about 90%. Non-directed kidney donations can also help the organ bank solve allocation problems around matching donors and recipients of different blood types.
Most sources say that an average donated kidney creates a "chain" of about five other donations, but most of these other donations would have happened anyway; the value over counterfactual is about 0.5 to 1 extra transplant completed before the intended recipient dies from waiting too long. So in total, a donation produces about 10 - 20 extra quality-adjusted life years.
Liver donation seems to generate less QALYs, though the estimates vary a lot.
So I'm currently leaning towards donating my kidney. Does anyone have any more insights into this? Does anyone know of an analysis that compares the two? (If someone is/wants to write one, I'd be glad to help) Please share your thoughts.
Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org