Is Facebook a good place to find a kidney?

Jeff Kurze found a kidney on Facebook, thanks to his wife's donor-seeking status update.

Anu Dwivedi has a new kidney thanks to her daughter's social-networking skills.

A new study has confirmed that these stories aren't exceptions. Facebook is becoming the place to be when seeking organ donations.

Alex Chang, MD, of Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Ill., and colleagues followed 91 Facebook profiles of individuals and their families seeking kidney transplants.

Chang's study was initiated before Prisilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg new wife, came up with the idea of letting Facebook users indicate that they've signed up to donate their organs when they die.

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While it was difficult to measure Facebook's actual role in finding donors, Chang's team determined that 30 per cent of the organ donation pages found potential donors who were tested for a match, and 12 per cent of the pages found a successful match.

Unfortunately, only 5 per cent of the pages outlined medical risks, and only 11 per cent mentioned medical costs to the donor.

"Use of social media could be an effective way to solicit kidney donation, but more study is needed to determine how to do this safely and with enough knowledge to make informed decisions," Chang says.

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The next steps in the research will be to contact those whose profiles were featured in the study and see if they considered Facebook crucial in finding their match.

"It's hard to figure out who received a kidney and who was successful at using Facebook and how it was mediating their success," Chang tells MedPage Today. "But it looked like some people were very successful in spreading the message, by getting friends to post on their walls, finding random people in their networks to step up and be tested and eventually receive a transplant."

Watch the video below about how Helen Campbell became the poster child for organ donation after receiving new lungs.