Evolving Mortality Trends Among Anatomical Donors in Scotland: Adapting Anatomical Education to a Changing Population

Body donation provides vital educational value for medical students and is essential for sustaining anatomy teaching in the UK. However, the clinical and demographic characteristics of donors—and how these may change over time—are rarely examined in depth. This study presents a ten-year retrospective analysis of 848 donors accepted into the University of Glasgow’s body donation programme between 2013 and 2023, with the aim of identifying mortality trends and their implications for anatomical education. Donor causes of death were anonymised and categorised into primary, secondary, and tertiary classifications. These were grouped into key categories, including cancer, non-contagious infection, cardiovascular disease, neurological disorders, respiratory disease, renal failure, and age-related frailty. Analyses were conducted using RStudio to generate descriptive statistics and data visualisations. Non-contagious infection was the most common primary cause (26.5%), followed by cancer (22.3%) and cardiovascular disease (19.3%). Secondary causes more frequently included neurological conditions (15.9%) and respiratory disease (9.9%). Frailty of old age became more prominent in secondary and tertiary roles, indicating an increasingly elderly donor population with complex comorbidities. Nearly half of all donors had no recorded third cause of death. These findings highlight changes in donor health profiles and their relevance to anatomical teaching, including specimen handling, curriculum design, and donor programme planning. The study also demonstrates the value of long-term donation data in developing sustainable, ethically grounded educational strategies.