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©The Author(s) 2025. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Transplant. Jun 18, 2025; 15(2): 101986
Published online Jun 18, 2025. doi: 10.5500/wjt.v15.i2.101986
Published online Jun 18, 2025. doi: 10.5500/wjt.v15.i2.101986
Rise in deaths from drug overdose and firearm injury during coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic and its impact on organ transplantation
Roshan Dhand, Horace Greeley High School, Chappaqua, NY 10514, United States
Kenji Okumura, Seigo Nishida, Department of Surgery, Westchester Medical Center and New York Medical College, Valhalla, NY 10595, United States
Abhay Dhand, Department of Surgery and Medicine, Westchester Medical Center and New York Medical College, Valhalla, NY 10595, United States
Author contributions: Dhand A and Okumura K contributed to conceptualization and design; Dhand R, Okumura K, Nishida, S and Dhand A contributed to material preparation, data acquisition, and analysis; All authors contributed to writing-draft manuscript and writing-revision and approved to submit the final version.
Institutional review board statement: This study was considered exempt by the Institutional Review Board because of secondary use of the de-identified data.
Informed consent statement: Informed consent was not required for this retrospective study using de-identified data from pre-existing databases.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Data sharing statement: Dataset used for this study available from the corresponding author at abhay.dhand@wmchealth.org and from https://wonder.cdc.gov/.
STROBE statement: The authors have read the STROBE Statement—a checklist of items, and the manuscript was prepared and revised according to the STROBE Statement-a checklist of items.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Abhay Dhand, MD, Associate Professor, Department of Surgery and Medicine, Westchester Medical Center and New York Medical College, 100 Woods Road, ACP- Transplant Center, Valhalla, NY 10595, United States. abhay.dhand@wmchealth.org
Received: October 4, 2024
Revised: October 30, 2024
Accepted: November 20, 2024
Published online: June 18, 2025
Processing time: 140 Days and 10.1 Hours
Revised: October 30, 2024
Accepted: November 20, 2024
Published online: June 18, 2025
Processing time: 140 Days and 10.1 Hours
Core Tip
Core Tip: Population based deaths from substance abuse and firearm injury increased during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in the United States. The progressive increase in the crude rate of firearm injury and substance abuse death seen during the early part of COVID-19 pandemic continues to persist, with a higher impact in Black/African American, American Indian or Alaska Natives, and those in United States south central and rural areas. These morality trends correlate with changes in organ donation resulting in rise in donors who died from drug overdose and firearm injury from 2014-2021, with a significant increase seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.