In recent years, the opioid epidemic and new hepatitis C virus (HCV) treatments have changed the landscape of organ procurement and allocation. We studied national trends in solid organ transplantation (2000⁻2016), focusing on graft utilization from HCV seropositive deceased donors in the pre-2014 (2000⁻2013) versus current (2014⁻2016) eras with a retrospective analysis of the United Network for Organ Sharing database. During the study period, HCV seropositive donors increased from 181 to 661 donors/year. The rate of HCV seropositive donor transplants doubled from 2014 to 2016. Heart and lung transplantation data were too few to analyze. A higher number of HCV seropositive livers were transplanted into HCV seropositive recipients during the current era: 374 versus 124 liver transplants/year. Utilization rates for liver transplantation reached parity between HCV seropositive and non-HCV donors. While the number of HCV seropositive kidneys transplanted to HCV seropositive recipients increased from 165.4 to 334.7 kidneys/year from the pre-2014 era to the current era, utilization rates for kidneys remained lower in HCV seropositive than in non-HCV donors. In conclusion, relative underutilization of kidneys from HCV seropositive versus non-HCV donors has persisted, in contrast to trends in liver transplantation.
Keywords: direct-acting antiviral agents; drug overdose; hepatitis C virus; kidney transplantation; organ utilization.