Motorcycle rallies are a boon … for people waiting for organ donors.

MedPage Today maps the correlation between riding fast and free and donating your young organs to people who need them:

Compared with the 4 weeks before and after rallies, there was an estimated 21% more organ donors per day during the rallies (incidence rate ratio [IRR] 1.21, 95% CI 1.09-1.35, P=0.001), as well as 26% more transplant recipients per day (IRR 1.26, 95% CI 1.12-1.42, P<0.001), reported Anupam Jena, MD, PhD, of Harvard Medical School in Boston, and colleagues.

“This amounts to approximately 1 additional donor or 6 additional transplant recipients in these regions for every 2 major motorcycle rallies,” they wrote in JAMA Internal Medicine.

“During motorcycle rally weeks in distant regions not containing motorcycle rallies, there was no increase in the number of organ donations or transplants, suggesting that our observed main effect was associated with the rallies rather than other temporal factors such as vacation travel,” the authors wrote.


You can read more of Jena’s (and colleagues’) study, here in JAMA.