Division of Transplantation Assistant Professor Carrie Thiessen, MD, PhD, was recently awarded a 5-year, $956,000 career development award from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. NIH career development awards provide early-stage investigators with dedicated time, training, and funding to support their transition into independent research careers.
Thiessen, an abdominal transplant surgeon and bioethicist, is interested in patient and provider decision-making, ethics, and organ donation policy. With this NIH award, she will study how transplant surgeons and patients on the kidney transplant wait list decide what quality of organs to accept for transplantation.
“There are more than 90,000 patients in the U.S. who are currently waiting for a kidney transplant, yet we have thousands of kidneys from deceased donors that are unused each year because they are deemed ‘imperfect’,” explained Thiessen. “However, many of these kidneys are in fact transplantable. Declining an imperfect but transplantable kidney means a patient would have to remain on dialysis while they wait for another kidney offer. During this time, they could become too sick to transplant or even die while on the waiting list.”
Thiessen plans to evaluate cognitive biases that may exist for both patients and physicians when considering imperfect kidney transplant offers. These biases are unconscious and systematic errors in our thinking that occur when we process information, and they could lead to decisions that do not optimize patient welfare.
“Understanding how patients and transplant surgeons are influenced by cognitive biases when considering imperfect kidney offers will help us develop interventions to enhance their decision-making processes, which could ultimately improve outcomes for patients with end-stage kidney disease, decrease the organ non-utilization rate, and reduce wait times on the kidney transplant waiting list,” said Thiessen.