The U.S. heart transplant list isn’t accurately listing the sickest children highest, a new study claims Kids with more urgency can wind up in the lowest category of need Sicker kids within categories also can be overlooked in favor of kids who’ve been on the list longer MONDAY, Aug.
5, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- The U.S. heart transplant list for children isn’t accurately ranking the sickest kids highest, making it more likely they may die while waiting for a donor heart, a new study claims.
Some very sick children were categorized as category 2, the lowest of the three categories of urgency on the list, while others who were not as sick had a 1A “most urgent” status, researchers found. As a result, a less sick child was sometimes offered a donor heart that might have gone to a child nearer death, results showed. “The current system is not doing a good job of capturing medical urgency, which is one of its explicit goals,” said researcher Kurt Sweat , a graduate student in economics at Stanford University.
For the study, researchers analyzed data from all 12,408 children younger than 12 listed for heart transplants between January 1999 and June 2023 in the United States. The team compared kids’ actual ranking on the wait list with how they would have been ranked if their listing was based on medical urgency. “From the perspective of economics, we think about this fundamentally as an allocation problem,” Sweat said in a university news release.
“We’ve got.