Seventy-nine-year-old Bruce Anderson became the oldest patient in Indiana to receive a liver transplant, which calls into question the age barrier many patients meet when searching for a viable organ transplant program, according the Indy Star.
Mr. Anderson was turned down by multiple organ transplant programs due to his age. He then sought out the transplant program in Indianapolis, where Chandrashekhar Kubal, MD, a transplant surgeon at Indiana University Health, cleared him for the procedure.
"In our program, we do not have a cutoff or we don't believe in putting numbers in our selection criteria," Dr. Kubal told the Indy Star. "We look at patients individually. ... If you can get five to 10 years of good quality of life, I think that's worthwhile."
In the U.S., each transplant program creates its own criteria on how it accepts or rejects a transplant, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. Dr. Kubal noted age will always be a consideration in medical decision-making, though physicians have been letting older patients undergo organ transplant surgery.
Organ transplant consideration will continue to rely on which patients are considered a "risky surgery" and which are not. Older transplant patients carry the stigma of being at higher risk of developing disease years after the transplant, as opposed to younger transplant patients.
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