Disparities in donor acceptance rates point to need for more equitable heart transplant care
When a patient is going through end-stage heart failure, the best treatment is to get a heart transplant. The basic steps are familiar: First a patient gets on the waiting list, and then the wait begins for the offers. In recent years, access to donor hearts has gone up thanks to a change in heart allocation policy, but there are still gender- and race-based disparities in the acceptance rate of a donor heart offer by transplant teams, according to new research published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. While both white and Black women were more likely to have an offered heart accepted by their transplant team, Black men had the longest wait for a transplant, as transplant centers repeatedly rejected offers. The high number of rejections may translate to a longer wait time and a higher waitlist mortality for Black men, some transplant experts say.
The findings, said first author Khadijah Breathett, were “really bizarre.” The number of matched offers until an accepted offer was much lower for women, especially white women, while they were greatest for Black men. For every offer that was made, the odds were significantly lower for Black individuals than white individuals that the offer would be accepted. Researchers said that the median number of offers was 11 for Black men, seven for Black women, nine for white men and five for white women.
