Brain death not accepted by Chinese, so model IDs those for organ donation
WEDNESDAY, April 8, 2015 (HealthDay News) — A new model accurately identifies potential organ donors following cardiac death in neurocritical patients removed from life support. The findings were published online March 21 in the American Journal of Transplantation.
Xiaoshun He, M.D., from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, and colleagues retrospectively evaluated 419 neurocritical patients who underwent life support withdrawal at four neurosurgical centers in China. The authors sought to identify factors predicting patient death.
The researchers identified 10 variables that were incorporated into a nomogram. The C-indexes for predicting the 60-minute death probability in the training, external validation, and prospective validation cohorts were 0.96 (95 percent confidence interval [CI], 0.93 to 0.98), 0.94 (95 percent CI, 0.91 to 0.97), and 0.99 (95 percent CI, 0.97 to 1.00), respectively. There was optimal agreement between the prediction of time to death by the nomogram and the actual observation for all cohorts. There were significant differences in prognoses based on risk stratification cut-off points.
“We have developed and validated a nomogram to accurately identify potential cardiac death donors in neurocritical patients in a Chinese population,” the authors write.
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