The postmortem sociomedical interview: uncertainty in confirming infectious disease risks of young tattooed donors.

Purpose: To assess the reproducibility of relatives' replies to questions asked at the time of corneal donation and again 2 months later concerning infectious disease risk factors and to identify characteristics associated with inconsistent responses.

Methods: A reinterview study involving individuals who answered questions regarding an eye donor's sociomedical history within 1 day of the decedent's death and who consented to be recontacted 6 to 12 weeks later. The main outcome measures were frequency of answering differently on the same questions of infectious disease risk factors and the donors' and relatives' characteristics that predicted inconsistency.

Results: Of 368 individuals who agreed to a reinterview, 263 (71.5%) completed and returned the survey questionnaire. Thirty-eight (14.4%) respondents answered differently on at least one question concerning infectious disease risk factors. The family of donors with a trauma-related death was 2.9 [95% confidence interval (CI), 1.0-8.3] times more likely to give inconsistent responses. Different responses to behavioral questions occurred 22 (95% CI, 1.6-315) times more often by relatives of donors who were both younger than 40 years old and had a tattoo.

Conclusion: The postmortem sociomedical interview cannot assure complete knowledge of the risk of potentially transmissible disease of all donors. Relatives of young, tattooed donors tend to give inconsistent responses about infectious disease risk factors.