KIDNEY DONORS MORE OUTGOING, POSITIVE THAN AVERAGE

In a personality study of more than 200 potential kidney donors, researchers found that the donors were friendlier, less anxious and had generally brighter outlooks on life compared with the average person.

Dr. David Edwin and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, compared the donors' answers on a standard personality test with norms from the general population. Besides being more positive in general, the donors were also more motivated and self-confident but less impulsive than average, according to findings presented Monday at a joint meeting of the American Society of Transplantation and the American Society of Transplant Surgeons.

"Our donor pool has never been characterized psychologically before," Edwin told Reuters Health. "It's not surprising that we don't have good psychological data on these people because we don't have good physical follow-up data either."

Edwin pointed out that these findings argue against the notion that kidney donors are more easily coerced than most people are. "We found that, if anything, they tended to be a more extroverted, outgoing group of people," he said.

"Donors tend to be the sorts of people who are active and more willing to do new things in general and who have a greater capacity for reward," Edwin noted.

"With organ shortages being a major concern," he added, "I think it is important to emphasize that, by and large, donors are healthy people making healthy decisions, not victims."

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