Survey of Pediatricians' Opinions on Donation After Cardiac Death: Are the Donors Dead?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: There has been debate in the ethics literature as to whether the donation-after-cardiac-death donor is dead after 5 minutes of absent circulation. We set out to determine whether pediatricians consider the donation-after-cardiac-death donor as dead. METHODS: A survey was mailed to all 147 pediatricians who are affiliated with the university teaching children's hospital. The survey had 4 pediatric patient scenarios in which a decision was made to donate organs after 5 minutes of absent circulation. Background information described the organ shortage, and the debate about the term "irreversibility" applied to death in donation after cardiac death. Descriptive statistics were used, with responses between groups compared by using the chi(2) statistic. RESULTS: The response rate was 54% (80 of 147). In each scenario, when given a patient described as dead with absent circulation for 5 minutes, <or=60% of respondents strongly agreed/agreed that the patient is definitely dead, <or=50% responded that the patient is in the state called "dead," and <or=56% strongly agreed/agreed that the physicians are being truthful when calling the patient dead. On at least 1 of the scenarios, 38 (48%) of 147 responded uncertain, disagree, or strongly disagree that the patient is definitely dead. Although the patients in the 4 scenarios were in the identical physiologic state, with absent circulation for 5 minutes, 12 (15%) of 80 respondents did not consistently consider the patients in the state called "dead" between scenarios. Fewer than 5% of respondents answered strongly agree/agree to allow donation after cardiac death while also answering disagree/strongly disagree that the patient is definitely dead, suggesting little support to abandon the dead-donor rule. CONCLUSIONS: Most pediatrician respondents were not confident that a donation-after-cardiac-death donor was dead. This suggests that additional debate about the concept of irreversibility applied to donation after cardiac death is needed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".