Selection Criteria Optimal for Recovery of Inner Ear Tissues From Deceased Organ Donors

Objective: To identify optimal conditions for recovering viable inner ear tissues from deceased organ donors.

Setting: Tertiary recovery hospitals and Donor Network West Organ Recovery Center.

Interventions: Recovering bilateral inner ear tissues and immunohistological analysis.

Main outcome measures: Immunohistochemical analysis of utricles from human organ donors after brain death (DBD) or donors after cardiac death (DCD).

Results: Vestibular tissues from 21 organ donors (39 ears) were recovered. Of these, 18 donors (33 utricles) were examined by immunofluorescence. The sensory epithelium was present in seven utricles (two from DBD and five from DCD). Relative to DBD utricles, DCD organs more commonly displayed dense populations of hair cells and supporting cells. Relative to DBD, DCD had significantly shorter postmortem interval time to tissue recovery (<48 h). Compared to donors with no sensory epithelium, donors with intact and viable sensory epithelium (both DCD and DBD) had significantly shorter lag time to resuscitation prior to hospital admission (6.4 ± 9.2 vs 35.6 ± 23.7 min, respectively) as well as a shorter time between pronouncements of death to organ recovery (22.6 ± 30.4 vs 64.8 ± 22.8 h, respectively).

Conclusions: Organ donors are a novel resource for bilateral inner ear organs. Selecting tissue donors within defined parameters can optimize the quality of recovered inner ear tissues, thereby facilitating future research investigating sensory and nonsensory cells.