Euskadi is launching a new program of donation of brain drain.

-from a prior informed consent by the patient, the new protocol manages the brain donation even if the person dies at his home

-thanks to the coordination of the Basque BioBank for research (o+ehun), the samples will be available for basic and clinical researchers

-Euskadi has two centres of extraction: Alava Txagorritxu hospital (to Araba / Alava and Bizkaia) and the Hospital Donostia (Gipuzkoa)

-the program involves the coordination of the Basque public health hospitals, centres of extraction, associations of patients and families of donors

Bilbao, December of 2011- the Basque public healththrough the Basque BioBank for research (o+ehun) has announced on Monday the implementation underway of a new brain donation program in the three Basque provinces. The program is an essential tool in the study of psychiatric diseases and neurodegenerative as e.g., Alzheimer’s disease. In this sense, the Bank represents a support service to research with a consistent function that promotes collaboration between researchers from different disciplines who want to understand why there are neurological diseases, how can be diagnosed and how can be treated ”, said Roberto BilbaoHead of the Basque BioBank for research…

The procedure allows that, regardless of whether the donor dies at home or in a health centre, is the removal of the body quickly and painlessly for the family, always perform, from a prior consent ”.

Thanks to this new program research in neurological diseases and neurodegenerative will receive a strong boost, as well as other pathologies, especially psychiatric and vascular ”. The expert has stressed that the coordination of the samples by the BioBank allows access to all researchers, health care, and basic who meet the requirements of working with this kind of samples, facilitating research in this field, unlike other private collections of brains ”.

The leadership of the programme by the Basque BioBank for research assumes the coordination of the hospitals of Basque public health, the centres of extraction, funeral of the three historical territories, associations of patients and the families of donors.

Roberto Bilbao has pointed out that the new program is a pioneer, because that is the first of these characteristics is able to coordinate the collection of samples from several provinces at the same time ”. In this sense, the programme has two centres of extraction: one in Alava hospital Txagorritxu, to attend the donors of Araba / Alava and Bizkaia, and another in Hospital Donostia, responsible for the donors of Gipuzkoa.

The choice of such centres of extraction attends to its long history of working with samples of brain drain. Thus, the Txagorritxu Hospital has been since the end of the 1990s collecting samples of brains with suspicion of diseases with priónico origin and has one the best collections of brains with Spain prion diseases ”.

Procedure

The donation process begins in the own health centres, either through medical consultations or services of intensive care, with the recruitment of patients, always, with appropriate informed consent and with the maximum guarantees of confidentiality and anonymity ”.

Thus, when the patient dies, either at home or in a health centre, the body is moved to its corresponding extraction Center in coordination with the funeral of the Basque country to count on your collaboration in this process. Its role is in the collection of the body, its transfer to the mining and its return to the home or the funeral, so continue with the usual funeral process ”. Costs added to the donation, not represent a cost to the family of the donor.

Subsequently, samples are treated, analyzed and cataloged, becoming part of the bio of samples of the BioBank that researchers can already access ”, the expert has concluded.