About a year and a half ago I seriously considered donating. I went through the screening and got approved to donate. During the screening process a doctor mentioned a study about post-operative pain, which I believe was this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6790588/
IIUC, the study reports that ~1/20 donors reported chronic pain (that they self-report is due to the operation) years after the operation, and that those that do report a significantly decreased quality of life. The study doesn’t have any controls, so it’s possible that this is mostly due to the donors being mistaken about the pain being caused by the surgery.
That study gave me enough pause that I so far have not gone through with the donation. Curious to hear your thoughts on it.
I don’t have any special insight. I would be surprised if there were aspects of donation that made the surgery especially likely to result in post-operative pain, so I would imagine that the prevalence of post-operative pain in general would give you some clue about how reliable this study is. That said, given what I’ve read, if there were subtle ways in which it significantly reduced quality of life, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t well publicized. It seems to me a good sign that the doctor mentioned the possibility of post-operative pain to you.
About a year and a half ago I seriously considered donating. I went through the screening and got approved to donate. During the screening process a doctor mentioned a study about post-operative pain, which I believe was this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6790588/
IIUC, the study reports that ~1/20 donors reported chronic pain (that they self-report is due to the operation) years after the operation, and that those that do report a significantly decreased quality of life. The study doesn’t have any controls, so it’s possible that this is mostly due to the donors being mistaken about the pain being caused by the surgery.
That study gave me enough pause that I so far have not gone through with the donation. Curious to hear your thoughts on it.
I don’t have any special insight. I would be surprised if there were aspects of donation that made the surgery especially likely to result in post-operative pain, so I would imagine that the prevalence of post-operative pain in general would give you some clue about how reliable this study is. That said, given what I’ve read, if there were subtle ways in which it significantly reduced quality of life, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t well publicized. It seems to me a good sign that the doctor mentioned the possibility of post-operative pain to you.