Can Stillborn babies be organ donors?
I'm doing some research and am curious if a stillborn infant can be an organ donor (specifically for the heart).
Under what parameters would a recipient be able to receive them in terms of the stillborn's type of death? Is there a cut off of the age of the recipient that the heart would be too small?
This is the article I read about the donation: www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-health/littlest-donors-neonatal-organ-donation-offers-hope-tragedy-n51436
Any guidance is appreciated! Thank you in advance.
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Practically it is not possible to use a still born heart. One would have to monitor the exact time of death when the heart stops in utero, then retrieve the still born by caesarean section, then harvest the heart to resuscitate it, and keep it alive long enough to match for a donor and so forth. There isn't enough time.
Normally beating hearts are harvested from brain dead people for heart transplantation so that there's no need to resuscitate a dead heart.
Experimentally dead hearts have been used but this involved removing the heart 5 minutes after death in an adult.
Currently, donor hearts are taken from brain dead patients whose hearts are still beating, which limits the number of hearts available for transplant.
But the donor hearts used for these world-first transplants had been dead for at least 20 minutes, and were revived using a ground-breaking preservation fluid before being successfully transplanted into patients with heart failure.
www.sciencealert.com/news/20142410-26393.html
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