Organ Donation at Mayo Clinic

Living donation. You can be a living donor by donating one of your kidneys, part of your liver or bone marrow.  There are two forms of living donation.  

Directed organ donation is when your loved one or friend is in need of a kidney or liver, and you are a match and are able to donate one of your kidneys or part of your liver to them.
Non-directed organ donation is when you do not know of a recipient in need but go in for an evaluation and offer to donate to the first person you match with. At Mayo Clinic, you can be a non-directed donor for both your kidney and liver. When you become a non-directed donor, you often kickstart a paired donation chain.

Learn more about living donation at Mayo Clinic.

Deceased donation. When you register to be an organ donor on the national registry or through your local department of motor vehicles (DMV), you are expressing that if you were to sustain a severe brain injury that you'd like to give the gift of life to those waiting.  

Paired donation. For paired donation, donors and their recipients aren't compatible for a transplant. However, the donor of each pair is compatible with the recipient of the other pair. If both donors and recipients are willing, your doctors may consider a paired donation. This program provides a way for people to receive a living-donor transplant instead of being on the deceased-donor waiting list for several years. 

Learn more about paired donation here.

No. They are two separate registries.

The National Donate Life Registry is found at RegisterMe.org.
Your state donor registry can be found by contacting your Donate Life State Team. If you registered at your local DMV, your donor registration is in your state donor registry.

Both your state donor registry and the National Donate Life Registry are checked by donation professionals at the time of your death. The most recent donor registration is honored as your legal document of gift.

You can register in both if you want to do so.

If you are registered in your state donor registry, you can still register your donation decision in the National Donate Life Registry at RegisterMe.org or in your iPhone Health App. It takes less than a minute and does not conflict with the state donor registry.
Your national registration will travel with you across state lines. Your state donor registry and the National Donate Life Registry will be checked online by donation professionals at the time of your death. The most recent donor registration is honored as your legal document of gift.

Now that you have the facts, you can see that being an organ donor can make a big difference, and not just to one person. By donating your organs and tissue after you die, you can save or improve as many as 75 lives. Many families say that knowing their loved one helped save or improve other lives helped them cope with their loss. 

It's especially important to consider becoming an organ donor if you belong to an ethnic minority. Minorities including African Americans, Asians and Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, and Hispanics are more likely than whites to have certain chronic conditions that affect the kidneys, heart, lung, pancreas and liver. 

Certain blood types are more prevalent in ethnic minority populations. Because matching blood type is usually necessary for transplants, the need for minority donor organs is especially high. 

Understanding Organ Donation

Organ donation is the key thing that makes transplant possible. It's a lifesaving procedure, but we can only offer that when we have organs available for transplant. Organ donation is so important because many people who would benefit from transplant, who are listed in waiting for transplant, actually die without ever receiving access to transplant. And that's because there's a critical shortage of donor organs available. Organ donation is possible as a deceased donor or as a living donor. In order to make your wishes known about organ donation, there are several ways to do it. The most common is to, when you register for your driver's license, to check the box. There are other ways to do it, including a national registry where it's very simple, you can just go onto the website and you can make your wishes known. Living donation is when somebody makes a decision to have surgery on behalf of someone else, and they donate either their kidney or part of their liver, or in the case of a bone marrow donor, they undergo bone marrow donation. In the case of kidney or liver, most of the time somebody is what we call a directed donation. So they donate directly to their loved one. But sometimes people know that they want to be an organ donor and they haven't identified an intended recipient. And in that case, these remarkable individuals simply donate in a non directed way and we select compatible recipient.

Organ donation is an extremely altruistic endeavor. Living donation in particular, you're actually stepping forward and volunteering to save another person's life. And that does put your own self at some risk of having a surgery and recovering from a surgery. The most important thing is to make sure you understand what's involved and know that it's something that we do a lot and that is remarkably beneficial for the recipient as having a big surgery. But it's possible to recover very well from that surgery and get back to everything you were doing before you underwent donation. Somebody questions about living donation, they're uncertain whether they want to proceed. So we certainly have developed a lot of reading material that could be available for people to look through, questions that could be answered over the phone, either with our donor advocate or our donor nurse coordinators. But probably the thing I would recommend would be most helpful is we have the opportunity for our nurses to allow you to speak to someone else who's gone through the process that may help you to get those questions answered. We have this therapy that works really well, but we can't give it to everybody that needs it when an organ is available for one of the patients, you know, that's fantastic.

Understanding Organ Donation

Why the national registry?

Is the National Donate Life Registry the same thing as my local state registry?

Why are there state donor registries and a National Donate Life Registry?

If I’m registered in my state registry, do I need to register again in the National Donate Life Registry?

Why you should consider organ donation

Sign up to be an organ donor.

Understanding Organ Donation