Live Donor Statistics

I looked up some statistics on the number of live donor transplants by year in the United States.

There have been a total of 5,032 live donor transplants. For reference, this is 4% of the total number of liver transplants (126,142) since 1988. As you can see, the first live liver donation occurred in 1989 (New York Times Article), the year the World Wide Web was conceived. Adult live organ donation is even later, with Lahey Hospital starting in 1999, and performing 263 transplants to date.

We’re still on the cutting edge of science. It’s almost impossible to imagine that when I was diagnosed in 2004, live organ donation was still in it’s infancy. Science is fascinating.