Department of Economics, Social Sciences University of Ankara, Ulus, Ankara C421, Turkey.
Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Institute of Advanced Social Studies, Córdoba, Spain.
Health Policy. 2023 Oct;136:104890. doi: 10.1016/j.healthpol.2023.104890. Epub 2023 Aug 12.
This study investigates the cascading effects of COVID-19 pandemic on organ donation and transplantation in Europe. We also check whether legislative defaults for organ donation have a role in these outcomes. For this purpose, we used data from 32 European countries, between 2010 and 2021, and estimated pooled OLS regressions. We find that COVID-19 pandemic reduced deceased organ donation rates by 23.4%, deceased kidney transplantation rates by 27.9% and live kidney transplantation rates by 31.1% after accounting for health system capacity indicators. While our study finds that presumed consent legislation under normal circumstances leads to notable benefits in terms of deceased kidney transplantation and organ donation rates, the legislative defaults did not have a significant impact during the pandemic. Additionally, our findings indicate a trade-off between living and deceased transplantation that is influenced by the legislative default.
本研究调查了 COVID-19 大流行对欧洲器官捐赠和移植的级联效应。我们还检查了器官捐赠立法默认是否在这些结果中发挥作用。为此，我们使用了 2010 年至 2021 年间来自 32 个欧洲国家的数据，并估计了汇总 OLS 回归。我们发现，在考虑到卫生系统能力指标后，COVID-19 大流行使 2021 年与 2010 年相比，已故器官捐赠率下降了 23.4%，已故肾脏移植率下降了 27.9%，活体肾脏移植率下降了 31.1%。虽然我们的研究发现，在正常情况下，假定同意立法在已故肾脏移植和器官捐赠率方面带来了显著的好处，但在大流行期间，立法默认并没有产生重大影响。此外，我们的研究结果表明，立法默认会影响到生与死之间的权衡。
