Purpose:
Corneal diseases are still on of the main causes of reversible blindness in the world, affecting young and economically active population causing huge economic and social losses. Despite the efforts that have been made, there are not enough corneas in Brazil. According to the Pan American Eye Bank Association (APABO) and the Eye Bank Association of America, good practices in eye banking include careful donor selection starting from family interview, throughtout hospital files, evaluation and examination of the donated tissue. The purpose of this study was to investigate the reasons for not harvesting corneas in the Hospital São Paulo Eye Bank.
Methods:
Cross-sectional study. Records of potential corneal donors were reviewed for a one-year period (July 2010 to July 2011) Information such as age, gender, time of death, and reasons for not interviewing family members were collected. Continuous and categorical variables were compared with Student’s t and chi-squared tests, respectively. All analysis was performed with Stata v.10 (College Station, TX, USA). This study was approved by the UNIFESP Research Ethics Committee (1699/11)
Results:
During the study period, 1,595 deaths with potential cornea donors occurred only in the Hospital São Paulo, 1,480 cases had complete data and included in the analysis, 155 donated corneas (10.5%)
Conclusions:
Overall, the population of potential donors include men over 60 years of age. Characteristics of donors and non-donors were similar, except for the causes of death.Reasons for not harvesting corneas in the HSP Eye Bank include modifiable factors such as familial issues and lack of communication between the hospital and the Eye Bank staff. Better management of communication issues between the hospital and Eye Bank and family members should improve the number of cornea donors.
Keywords: clinical (human) or epidemiologic studies: prevalence/incidence • transplantation