Every
day, significant number of people die due to failure
of one organ in the body or the other. One of the
life saving measure for these kind of patients is
organ transplantation. The success of human organ
transplant is steadily being improved. The increase
in mortality and morbidity rate is basically attributable
to unavailability of suitable organs in time.
Receiving a human organ from a healthy, living donor
is not always possible, and exposes a healthy person
to risk. So, receiving healthy organs from a dead
person will be ideal, as the donor is already dead
and many organs can be removed from one donor. Still
there is a lot of confusion in understanding the concept
of brain death with beating heart. This concept is
not widely understood yet.
Traditionally
we accept death as stoppage of functioning of heart.
However, studies over the years have shown that death
occurs with irreversible changes in brain, although
the heart may continue to beat for sometime beyond
that. The heart has its own pace maker independent
of brain, as long as it has oxygen it continues to
beat. So the brain can be dead yet the heart may continue
to beat.
Once
the brain is dead, the patient is already dead. Since
the patient is already dead, the health professionals
cannot kill him again by removing the respiratory
support. The respiratory support gives only the appearance
of live person at a high cost. Medico-legally, the
patient is pronounced as dead on the basis of brain
death with the heart still beating.
Determining death of a client is difficult with all
tubings and respiratory support.
Death
is indicated by :
- No pupil response to light
- No unassisted breathing.
- No response to stimuli.
