ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION: The incidence of organ transplantation between the Eastern and Western part of Europe is quite different. This has several reasons; the main cause may be the Great Schism (A. D. 1054) when the Byzantine Empire separated himself also religiously from Rome. Since then there has been a different historical development followable until our days. Later on, disintegration of four previous large empires into many smaller countries during the last 150 years, furthermore in the second half of the twentieth century the separation by the Iron Curtain in the middle of Europe led to different social-economic and infrastructural developments between the different parts of the continent. In the new millennium, all transplantations for the routinely performed 5 organs were available for the Hungarian patients, but the real era-changing happened in 2012/13 by joining Eurotransplant. OBJECTIVE: Our analysis is based on the transplantation numbers of the last pre-COVID pandemic year (2019). RESULTS: The abovementioned differences can be traced well by the transplantation numbers: 28 Western- and Middle-European countries have 22.2 cadaveric donors per million population versus 3.8 for 10 Eastern-European countries and another 7 do not have any. The numbers of transplanted organs are the following: 39.5 vs. 12.0 for kidney; 14.8 vs. 5.5 for liver; 5.4 vs. 0.8 for heart; 4.6 vs. 0.2 for lung. DISCUSSION: The statistics have also a rejoicing message because since the fall of the Iron Curtain, 10 Middle-European countries could reach the Western standards in organ transplantation. Their example is also good news for other Eastern European countries. CONCLUSION: Hungary was one of these countries who could benefit from the political changes and, by joining Eurotransplant, the quantity and quality of the transplanted organs was raised significantly: since then, there are by 40% more transplantations performed in our country. Orv Hetil. 2022; 163(30): 1181-1188.