Donorcycles: Organ Donations, Transplants Spike During Big Motorcycle Rallies

Researchers urge the transplant community not to 'squander' the opportunity to harvest organs during mass rallies.

With gallows humor, clinicians often refer to motorcycles as "donorcycles."

A new study published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine suggests that the epithet is well founded, and the authors of the study say the transplant community should not "squander" the opportunity to harvest life-saving organs during mass motorcycle rallies.  

Researchers from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital found that regions where the nation's seven largest motorcycle rallies were held between 2005 and 2021 saw 21% more organ donors per day, on average, and 26% more transplant recipients per day, on average, during these events, compared with days just before and after the rallies.

"The spikes in organ donations and transplantations that we found in our analysis are disturbing, even if not entirely surprising, because they signal a systemic failure to avoid preventable deaths, which is a tragedy," says study first author David Cron, MD, HMS clinical fellow in surgery at Mass General. "There is a clear need for better safety protocols around such events."

Big motorcycle rallies attract hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts, and earlier studies have shown that these events are accompanied by increases in traumatic injuries and deaths from motor-vehicle crashes.

Noting that they found no difference in the quality of organs donated due to clinical or demographic differences in donors during rallies, the researchers are urging transplant stakeholders to take note.

"It is important for transplant communities in places where these events are held to be aware of the potential for increased organ donors during those periods," Cron says. "Organ donation is often called the gift of life, and we should make sure that we do not squander it and can turn any of these tragic deaths into a chance to potentially save other lives."  

Using data from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients, researchers analyzed records from 10,798 organ donors and 35,329 recipients in the regions where the featured motorcycle rallies take place. During the rallies, there were 406 organ donors and 1,400 transplant recipients in regions near the events. During the four weeks before and after the rallies, there were 2,332 organ donors and 7,714 transplant recipients in those locations.  

Even with the spike in donated organs, the researchers found that the waiting times for transplant recipients were largely unchanged whether there was a rally event or not, which they say indicates "indicates that the increase in the number of organs available was not enough to relieve the critical shortage of donor organs that the nation faces, even for a brief period."

The seven motorcycle rallies in the study each draw more than 200,000 visitors over the course of several days. Daytona Bike Week in Florida and the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota are 10-day events that each draw 500,000 visitors.

Cron says the data used in the research was not detailed enough to determine whether the donors died in motorcycle crashes or in passenger vehicles.