VIDEO: Left digit bias limits the organs accepted from older deceased donors
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In this video, Seth A. Waits, MD, assistant professor and surgical director of liver transplantation at University of Michigan Health, discusses the impact of left digit bias on older organ donation acceptance.
Left digit bias occurs when an individual places value on the leftmost digit of a number. For example, a consumer may be more inclined to purchase an item that is $89.99 than if it were $90 because the leftmost digit, eight, is less than nine. In organ transplantation, Waits sought to determine if there was a bias to accept a 69-year-old organ before a 70-year-old organ due to the leftmost digit seen for the age of the organ.
Waits and colleagues conducted a retrospective cohort study on the data of 105,387 potential deceased organ donors who had any organs offered between 2010 and 2019 to determine if a left digit bias exists in organs offered and accepted for donors entering a new decade of age.
Analyses revealed a 5.4% decrease in likelihood of an organ being accepted from a deceased donor that was aged 70 years vs. 69 years. Therefore, there was a significant left digit bias in the acceptance of donor organs from deceased donors that were aged 60 years and 70 years.
“The one take-home message for any physician who makes decisions for their patients, are that these age barriers, these small heuristic changes in the patient and our small personal biases about age ... can affect our decision-making,” Waits told Healio. He added, “So potentially just bringing awareness to this issue, understanding how it might affect your decision-making and that the outcomes of a 69-year-old vs. a 70-year-old donor kidney are the same ... hopefully that will be enough to get our transplant community to stop ignoring these donors which cross a decade barrier in age.”
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