Bahrain research identifies increased health risks for transplant tourists

Receiving an organ from a paid, living donor at a commercial transplant centre may have considerable medical risks. Investigators in Bahrain set out to assess this by evaluating the health outcomes of patients who purchased organs internationally.A new study on transplant tourism-‘ Kidney Transplantation tourism: high risk for the recipients’ has been published in the journal Clinical Transplantation and presented at a major kidney conference in the USA.

Kidney transplant tourism — the practice of travelling abroad to purchase organs for transplant — has become more popular. Receiving an organ from a paid, living donor at a commercial transplant centre may have considerable medical risks.

Doctors and the medical tourism industry have studied the ethics of transplant tourism but there have been few studies on medical safety and outcomes.

Investigators in Bahrain set out to assess this by evaluating the health outcomes of patients who purchased organs internationally and came to their medical centre for follow-up care.

The study looked at 270 transplant patients who received follow-up care between 1986 and 2014. They were compared with 123 recipients of living related donor transplants. Of the commercial organ recipients, the main countries where patients underwent transplantation were the Philippines, India, and Pakistan.

Comparing these patients with the 123 controls, researchers saw that the commercial recipients were more likely to develop hepatitis C, hepatitis B, and cytomegalovirus, a virus that rarely manifests symptoms, but remains in the body for life.

One and 10-year survival rates of the transplanted organs in commercial recipients compared to controls were 91% at one year and 22% after 10 years, compared to local controls of 98% and 44%. The corresponding patient survival rates were 96% and 70% for commercial patients, and 98% and 78% for the controls.

Independent transplantation expert Dr. Francis Delmonico analysed the figures and agrees that the study results are within expected norms. While the study suggests transplant tourism is risky, one factor could be that those getting organs from overseas were desperate so were already more likely to die than the control sample.