Older donor corneas are just as fit for transplants as those with less mileage, according to a new research involving the Wilmer Eye Institute.
Doctors and recipients always assumed that older corneas would be less desirable, said Dr. Walter Stark, founder of the Stark Mosher Center for Cataract and Corneal Diseases at Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute.
“As you get older, over 65 or 70, corneal surgeons have been reluctant to use corneas from older donors,” Stark said. “There?s actually been an increasing shortage of corneal tissue available for transplantation.”
An article in theApril issue of Ophthalmology, and funded by the National Eye Institute, showed the five-year transplant success rate held steady at 86 percent whether corneas came from donors ages 12 to 65 years or from donors ages 66 to 75.
The cornea, clear tissue covering of the eye, is a main focusing element of the eye, according to the article. With more than 33,000 corneal transplants performed annually, it is also one of the most frequently transplanted parts of the human body.
The study included information collected from 1,101 participants from 80 sites including Wilmer, which specializes in corneal transplantation.
The lead causes of corneal transplants include injury and diseases like keratoconus, a thinning of the cornea, and Fuchs? dystrophy, a slowly progressing disease that causes the cornea to swell and distort vision, according to the National Eye Institute.
Transplants were considered successful if the patient did not require a repeat transplant or if the transplanted tissue did not cloud up. The main cause of failure, Stark said, is tissue rejection, which happened equally in both age categories.
Donor corneas are stored at refrigerated temperatures in a protective fluid with added antibiotics and are usually transplanted with three to seven days of donation, but, can be stored for up to two weeks before transplantation.
“These study results will expand the donor cornea pool and make scheduling of transplant procedures easier for the patients and the surgeons,” Stark said. “Maybe theses findings could lessen restrictive policies and expand the donor pool by as much as 20 to 35 percent.”
