Recent News

New Center and OPO Specific Reports Published July 11, 2008

On July 11, 2008, the SRTR released the newest version of the Program-Specific Reports. Released every six months, these reports provide different measures of performance and characteristics about each transplant program and OPO in the United States, including waitlist outcomes, post-transplant survival, and organ recovery and transplantation rates.

View Current Program-Specific Reports for all transplant centers and OPOs 

OPTN/SRTR Annual Report Published April 23, 2008

The 2007 OPTN/SRTR Annual Report, a publication of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has been released online. The report includes comprehensive data on solid organ transplantation during the last 10 years. It also includes nine chapters by transplant experts describing data highlights and trends, allocation policies, and new areas of research in transplantation -- as well as numerous resources for transplant professionals, patients and their families, and researchers. View the 2007 Annual Report.

2007 SRTR Report on the State of Transplantation published in AJT

The SRTR is pleased to report that "The 2007 SRTR Report on the State of Transplantation" has been published in the American Journal of Transplantation (AJT). All of these articles are available on this website. You also can find public-use slides as well as previous ROTSOT articles, abstracts, and manuscripts from other peer-publications from the SRTR here: Articles from "The 2007 SRTR Report on the State of Transplantation".

Measures of clinically-relevant performance published in AJT

Quality improvement is an essential aspect of clinical care processes. The cumulative summation technique (CUSUM) is a risk-adjusted outcomes measure intended to help transplant centers identify persistent, clinically relevant changes in performance over time. This study employed SRTR data to construct CUSUM charts predicting, by center, risk at one year of graft failure for kidney transplants and death following liver transplantation. The CUSUM charts aligned well with results of the established semi-annual OPTN review methods, suggesting that CUSUM may offer transplant centers a valuable internal tool to track performance in real time.

US-Canada kidney transplantation mortality rates

A recently published report by the SRTR compared mortality rates following kidney transplantation between recipients in the United States and Canada, using data from the national registries of both countries. The results showed an increase in overall mortality of 35% in U.S. (compared with Canadian) kidney transplant recipients. The relative risk of mortality was similar in the first year after transplantation but increased, and remained elevated, for U.S. patients after the first year. A similar pattern was seen for the number of years of pre-transplant dialysis.

ECD Mortality Paper Published in JAMA

Kidneys from expanded criteria donors (ECDs) are helping ease the organ shortage. But who among the many waiting-list candidates are most likely to benefit from these organs, which are characterized by a higher risk of graft failure? A new SRTR study, published December 7 in The Journal of the American Medical Association, shows that ECD transplants should be offered principally to candidates who are more than 40 years old in OPOs with long waiting times. In OPOs where the wait is shorter, only patients with diabetes are shown to have improved survival with ECD kidneys.

Further detail about this manuscript is available in this press release, and citation and PubMed abstract are available here.