A study recently found that the number of solid organ transplants decreased worldwide between 2019 and 2020, highlighting the widespread impact of the Covid pandemic -19 on hospital pressure.
The Covid-19 pandemic has put health systems around the world under pressure. Many establishments have indeed had great difficulty in containing the influx of seriously ill patients while ensuring the protection of their employees against the risk of infection.
On the patient side, there are direct victims, but also collateral victims. The hospital pressure encountered by a large number of countries because of the pandemic has in fact led to the postponement of many major surgeries. These include interruptions or delays in the treatment of many cancers. Another example is organ transplants, often essential for patients with end-stage organ disease (longer survival and better quality of life).
In July, a report by NHS Blood and Transplant had already pointed out that transplant activity had fallen by 20% in the year 2020-2021 in the UK . A total of 487 patients had died while waiting for a transplant, compared to 372 the previous year. A new study published in the journal Lancet Public Health today shows that the total number of kidney, liver, lung and heart transplants dropped by 31% during the first wave of Covid-19 in 22 countries. The drop was nearly 16% for the year as a whole with more than 11,000 fewer transplants performed .
"Time trends revealed a marked global reduction in transplant activity in the first three months of the pandemic, with losses stabilizing after June 2020 , but decreasing again from October to December 2020 “, writes the team of researchers.
Overall, kidney transplants were the most affected with a decrease of 19.14% (8,560 fewer transplants), followed by lung, liver and heart. For these scientists, this is "probably due to the non-immediate nature of this surgery and the possibility of postponing the procedures ".
According to these results, transplants from living donors experienced a greater decline than those from deceased donors. For the researchers, this could be explained by logistical difficulties coupled with concerns about the exposure of living donors to Covid in hospitals potentially risking infecting transplant patients, and therefore immunocompromised.
The researchers observed disparities by country according to the impact of the pandemic. In Canada, the number of transplants fell by 9.86% (227 fewer transplants), while Japan has just suffered a drop of 66.71% (1,413 fewer transplants). In France, 1410 transplants had to be postponed or cancelled, which represents a decrease of 28.96% .
Conversely, some countries such as the United States, Switzerland, Belgium and Italy have managed to maintain the rate of transplant procedures. Understanding how these different countries have been able to respond to the challenges of Covid-19 while safely maintaining their transplant programs will be essential in proposing solutions in the future.
