Organ transplantation in Taiwan.

We performed the first successful kidney transplantation in Taiwan on May 27, 1968. Since then, kidney, heart, lung, pancreas, liver, and heart-kidney transplantations have been increasingly successful in restoring lives of otherwise dying patients with organ failure. The first successful kidney, liver, and heart transplantations in Asia were achieved in Taiwan in 1968, 1984, and 1987. respectively. Individual organ transplantation, organ transplant recipient survival, graft survival, and problems and pitfalls encountered in the care of organ transplantation recipients are analyzed. Using polymerase chain reaction amplification with sequence-specific primers, donor-specific DNA was detected in the peripheral blood of the patient who survived the longest (26 years) in this series. Interestingly enough, recently, we had a patient undergoing cadaveric renal transplantation in whom chimerism was detected in her lymph nodes and skin only 3 years after transplantation. Organ procurement in Taiwan is the greatest problem, and we have been exerting our maximal effort to establish a transplantation coordination team to create a central network and to educate, procure, preserve, distribute, and increase the availability of organs and tissues for transplantation.