An estimated 20,000 of the 80,737 Americans on a national waiting list for organ transplants will never receive the organs they need, according to the New England Organ Bank.

As federally required, hospitals enlist all prospective organ recipients in a nation-wide database maintained by the United Network for Organ Sharing. Recipients are chosen from the list based on their immediate health and wait time, according to NEOB spokesman Sean Fitzpatrick. In some cases, transplants are determined by age.

‘Older people tend to have chronic diseases that affect other organs,’ Fitzpatrick said. ‘A young person may only have acute trauma to his liver and is otherwise completely health.’

‘You can’t put the heart of a 30-year-old into the body of a 10-year-old and vice versa.’

While the national database steadily grows annually, data gathered by the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) listed New England with the second lowest population of donors, reaching as low as 240 deceased donors last year. In the meantime, 3,515 New Englanders wait for new kidneys, livers, pancreases, hearts and lungs.

NEOB and Life Choice Donor Services, two of the most popularly contacted organ services in Massachusetts, are scrutinized for managing organs from only deceased donors, depriving prospective recipients from the organs of living donors.

‘We must not only do what is right for our patients, but we must also protect the health and interests of the living donor,’ said NEOB medical director Francis Delmonico.

Meanwhile, UNOS reported that living kidney donors now account for nearly 52 percent of all kidney donors, and the number of living donor liver transplants has doubled since 1999.

Also under attack is the refusal of states, such as Connecticut and Massachusetts, to join a trend of state-organized donor registries, a list of willing donors who may be contacted if successfully matched with recipients. Because of this, an accurate list of living donors in the New England area remains unavailable, according to Executive Director of Life Choice Donor Services Debbie Savaria.

‘Until there are registries that are really well-developed and are functioning at a level that is meaningful, [Massachusetts and Connecticut] are probably not going to jump on the registry bandwagon,’ she said.

But finding available organs and matching them with recipients is only half the story. According to Fitzpatrick, rejection is a common complication during transplantation, with the lowest success rate being after liver surgery at 59 percent. Kidney transplants have proven to be most successful with 88 percent of patients surviving, he said.

‘The important thing to remember is that, without these transplants, most of these people would otherwise be dead in a couple months or even weeks,’ Fitzpatrick said. ‘It’s an incredibly successful intervention.’

In order to spread the word about organ donations, Life Choice Donor Services conduct speaking engagements at public places, such as hospitals, health fairs and schools.

‘We never turn down a request for a speaker here,’ Savaria said.

The organization works with the Department of Public Health and the Department of Motor Vehicles.

In addition, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson announced two weeks ago that the month of April will be observed as National Donate Life Month to raise public awareness.