Transplant Statistics: Annual Report

Technical Notes and Analytic Methods
New In This Year's Report

The tables in the OPTN/SRTR 2001 Annual Report are substantially different in appearance but are similar in organization to earlier Annual Reports. All of the content areas covered in previous Annual Reports are included.

The biggest addition this year is the inclusion of center-specific risk-adjusted graft and patient survival tables in Appendix A of the printed Annual Report. These tables report data that were included in the Center-Specific Reports published on the SRTR Web site (www.ustransplant.org) in July 2001. More current center-specific data are available on that Web site, updated every six months.

The "Time to Transplant" tables (Table 1.5 and Table 2 in each organ-specific section) have been added. They show percentiles of time from wait listing to transplant - that is, the time until a percentage of wait listed patients receive a transplant. Previous Annual Reports have presented "Waiting Time," which differs from "Time to Transplant," in that the waiting time is censored at waiting list removal or death and inactive time is excluded. The "Time to Transplant" measure is chosen because it takes the point of view of a transplant candidate who wants to know his or her overall prospects for a transplant. Table 1.6 shows a "Waiting Time" measure similar to that used in previous Annual Reports.

Tables of death counts and annual death rates for demographic subgroups of transplant recipients have been added as Table 5 in each of the organ-specific sections.

Race and Hispanic/Latino ethnicity are reported separately for both donors and recipients, since they are not mutually exclusive categories and are collected as separate items on the OPTN forms.