Acquisition-Related Heterogeneity in Human Spinal Cord Donors: A 10-Year Organ Donation–Integrated Procurement Cohort for Translational Spinal Cord Injury Research

Access to adult human spinal cord tissue is critical for advancing translational spinal cord injury (SCI) research, yet procurement is intrinsically constrained by organ donation workflows and accompanied by heterogeneous clinical and procedural documentation. We characterized an organ donation–integrated adult human spinal cord donor cohort accrued over a decade (2016–2025) to define acquisition-related variables relevant to interpretation and comparability of human neurotrauma datasets. Adult donors ( N = 67) were analyzed to describe longitudinal accrual, donation pathway, cause-of-death distribution, anatomical procurement patterns, preservation solution usage, and an ischemic interval proxy (cross-clamp interval band). Clinical and operative documentation was harmonized using predefined standardized categories with explicit decision rules. Associations between donation pathway and key cohort variables were summarized descriptively using Cramér’s V as an effect-size measure without hypothesis testing. Donor accrual was sustained across the study period and included both neurological determination of death and donation after circulatory death pathways. Intracranial hemorrhage or stroke represented the most frequent cause-of-death category. Thoracic and lumbar spinal cord regions were most commonly procured, with multi-level sampling observed in a subset of donors. Preservation practices were harmonized into four standardized solution categories based on operative documentation. Modest structural associations were observed between donation pathway and procurement variables (Cramér’s V = 0.19–0.26), indicating measurable but limited acquisition-related heterogeneity in donor provenance and procurement conditions. These findings provide a transparent methodological and preanalytical characterization of a contemporary human spinal cord donor cohort and delineate acquisition-related variables that should be reported to support reproducible interpretation and cross-study comparability of translational analyses using adult human spinal cord tissue.