Organ donations from the recently deceased in the U.S. dropped last year for the first time in more than a decade, an analysis released Wednesday said, linking the change to signs of public mistrust in the organ-retrieval system. The analysis said the decline helped produce 116 fewer kidney transplants than in 2024. The report was based on federal data reviewed by the nonprofit Kidney Transplant Collaborative.
The need for transplants remains high. More than 100,000 people in the U.S. are on the list for an organ transplant, and the vast majority of them need a kidney, the analysis said. Thousands die each year waiting for a transplant.
The Kidney Transplant Collaborative analysis traced the decline to rare but troubling reports involving patients who were prepared for organ retrieval despite showing signs of life. It said planned retrievals connected to those reports were stopped, and the U.S. is developing additional safeguards for the transplant system.
The report also said the episode shook public confidence, prompting some people to remove their names from donor lists. Organ transplantation, the analysis said, saves tens of thousands of lives each year.
Dr. Andrew Howard, who leads the Kidney Transplant Collaborative, said the dip in kidney transplants last year would have been larger without a small increase in transplants from living donors. He said the living-donor increase was about 100 transplants, driven by the fact that living donation can occur when a healthy person donates one of their kidneys to someone in need.
Howard and the collaborative also emphasized that living donations make up a fraction of the roughly 28,000 yearly kidney transplants in the U.S. They argued for increasing living donations as a way to reduce dependence on deceased-donor supply.
The analysis said organ transplants had generally been rising year to year, with the exception of 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. It added that the deceased-donor decline did not reduce the total number of transplants overall: it said there were just over 49,000 transplants last year compared with 48,150 in 2024.
Federal data showed continued gains for other organs, including hearts, livers and lungs, the analysis said. Howard said the pattern was likely due to differences in how various organs are evaluated and allocated for transplant.
The Association of Organ Procurement Organizations, which was not involved in the analysis, said it was alarmed. The group called on its members, hospitals and federal regulators to unite in restoring public trust and strengthening the system.