Disclosing Health and Health Behavior Information between Living Donors and Their Recipients.
OBJECTIVE
Living donor guidelines-both national and international-either do not address or are vague about what information can be shared between prospective living donors and transplant candidates, as well as when to make such disclosures and who should make them. This study explored the attitudes of donors and recipients regarding how much information they believe should be shared.


METHODS
Two Email invitations were sent by the National Kidney Foundation (national headquarters) to its Email listservs, inviting members to participate in an online survey to assess the attitudes of kidney transplant stakeholders regarding the disclosure of health and health risk behavior information.


RESULTS
From approximately 4200 unique Email addresses, 392 (9.3%) respondents completed part or all of the survey. The analyses were limited to the 236 respondents who self-identified as either donors (potential and actual, n=160) or recipients (candidates and actual, n=76). Overall, 79% (186 of 234) of respondents supported disclosure of general recipient health information that would affect post-transplant outcome to donors, and 88% (207 of 235) supported disclosure of general donor health information to recipients. Recipients and donors were also supportive of sharing donor and recipient information, particularly information relevant to graft and patient survival. There is some reticence, however, about sharing social information. The closer the relationship, the more information they are willing to share. Both donors and recipients wanted the transplant team involved in the information disclosure. Over three quarters of donors (79%) and recipients (78%) did not think the recipient had a right to know why a donor was excluded from donating.


CONCLUSIONS
Both donors and recipients want a significant amount of health information to be disclosed. The opinions of other stakeholders need to be surveyed to determine whether a revision of current policies and practices is warranted.
Pritzker School of Medicine.
Leslie
L
Mataya
Pritzker School of Medicine.
Jacqueline
J
Meadow
Section of Transplantation, Department of Surgery, MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, and.
J Richard
JR
Thistlethwaite
University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, Wisconsin; and.
Didier A
DA
Mandelbrot
Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts.
James R
JR
Rodrigue
MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, and Departments of Medicine, Pediatrics, and Surgery, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; lross@uchicago.edu.
Lainie Friedman
LF
Ross
D001290:Attitude; D003219:Confidentiality; D005260:Female; D006085:Graft Survival; D015438:Health Behavior; D006304:Health Status; D006801:Humans; D016030:Kidney Transplantation; D019520:Living Donors / Q000523:psychology*; D008297:Male; D008603:Mental Health; D008875:Middle Aged; D019966:Substance-Related Disorders / Q000523:psychology; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D066027:Transplant Recipients / Q000523:psychology*; D014342:Truth Disclosure; D047568:Unsafe Sex
disclosure; kidney transplantation; living donors; privacy; risk factors