Iranian Journal of

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Background: Kidney transplantation is one of the major progresses of medical science with many ethical debates. The shortage of organs and the increases in waiting list for cadaver transplantation has leaded to transplantation from living donors. In this article, we discuss the ethics of transplantation from living kidney donors.
Methods: For compiling this article, we searched in Pubmed and Ovid by the keywords of kidney transplantation, living donor, ethics.
Results: At the first, the history and statistics of kidney transplantation in Iran and other countries are reviewed. We discussed the living kidney transplantation regarding to principles of nonmaleficence, autonomy and justice. The ethical issues of different groups of living donors and the proponents and opponents opinions are expressed. Because of the importance of unrelated living donors, this group is discussed more briefly.
Conclusion: It is realistic to consider the living kidney transplantation as the last option. Arranging a legal and social organization to control the monetary relationship of the recipients and donors and to determine the preferences of kidney receipt in waiting list is reasonable. It is essential to increase the cadaver transplantation resources to decrease the need of kidney transplantation from living donors.

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Background: Nowadays, many progresses have been occurred in medical science and transplantation process. Transplantation is now a life- saving standard treatment for some end stage diseases. Although the organs from brain death donors, are the best resource for cadaverous transplantation, there are many controversies among physicians about it's definition. The other important issue in transplantation is disparity between the supply and demand of organs. Because of the increasing demand for cadaverous organs it is necessary to use some new methods to fascilitate the availability of these resources. What is noteworthy is that each of these methods has some essential ethical issues that should be observed. Surely regarding these issues would prevent the future harms to human being and society.
Methods: For compiling the article, we searched in pubmed and ovid databases for keywords of cadaverous transplantation, brain death, medical ethics, informed consent.
Results: In this article, after a review of transplantation statistics in Iran and other countries we presented a definition for brain death and some methods to expand donor pools. Then ethical views in brain death and informed consent process for cadaverous organs transplantation was discussed.
Conclusion: In using cadaverous organs for transplantation, informed consent and respect to autonomy are very important. All people in the society are authorized to accept or refuse organ donation after their death and , physicians can only encourage and support them.

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Medical ethics has a long history worldwide, and the move towards a trans-cultural ethics must be based on an appreciation of the civilizations’ history. It is often thought that medical ethics history has begun by Hippocrates, however it is much older. It is clear that various cultures such as Babylonia, ancient Egypt, Greece, and the Persians have attempted to regulate medicine and to protect patients' rights in the known ancient world. One of the earliest written provisions in this field, which comes back to about 1750 BC, is the code of Hammurabi written by Babylonian. In this paper we aimed to explore the roots of medical ethics in Persian history, particularly, after adherence of Iranians to Islam. In this article, we used related books of great Iranian and non-Iranian historians, and examined some authentic articles collected through searches of databases such as Medline and Ovid and search engines such as Google Scholar. History of medicine in Iran has begun about fourth century BCE. Great Iranian physicians had paid special attention to ethics in their practices, teachings and manuscripts. There was a gap between the ancient civilizations and the Renaissance era in Europe, commonly called the dark ages (Medieval). The immense strides have been made by the Persians in that long interval which is briefly reviewed.