Evaluation of Patients with Brain Death Diagnosis and Investigation of the Effect of New Regulation on the Duration of Diagnosis

Abstract

Objective: Today, the number of patients waiting for organ transplantation is increasing. The detection of brain death in a cadaveric donor is valuable and should be performed quickly. In 2014, Turkish Ministry of Health introduced new regulation on the detection of brain death. With this regulation, it was decided that the medical death that was previously diagnosed by four physicians is now unanimously diagnosed by two physicians in accordance with the evidencebased medicine rules. In this study, we aimed to determine whether the current regulation change has an effect on the duration of brain death diagnosis and the number of donors. Materials and Methods: After obtaining the approval of the local ethics committee, the data of patients diagnosed with brain death in our hospital between 2009-2018 were examined. Patients with missing files were excluded from the study. The demographic data of the patients, time of hospitalization, brain death diagnosis time, donor status, tests performed for the diagnosis, physicians named in the brain death detection report and the time of cardiac death were noted. All cases were divided into two groups as "before 2014" (Group I) and "after 2014" (Group II). Results: In this study, 118 patients were included. Nineteen (16.1%) of the patients were children (<18 years) and 99 (83.9%) were adults. There were 67 patients (55.9%) in Group I and 51 patients (44.1%) patients in Group II. The time of diagnosis was longer in Group I (4.82 ± 3.6 days) than