Brayden Bennett was born with a rare metabolic disorder of the liver that would slowly rob him of brain function.

His mother said this week that she hopes a Feb. 4 liver transplant at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor will improve the 2-year-old’s quality of life.

“What brings tears to my eyes is that they made that decision and it changed my son’s life,” said Chasity Demkowski, Brayden's mother. “It gave him second chance at life that he didn’t have before.”

Brayden Bennett, 2, of Petersburg, Mich., recently received a liver transplant in Ann Arbor.

Brayden, of Petersburg, Mich., is one of thousands of people who have benefited from a growing statewide organ donation registry.

But thousands more are still waiting for a transplant.

Last year, the state’s organ donation registry saw record growth, the Michigan Health & Hospital Association Keystone Center for Patient Safety & Quality announced Wednesday. An MHA campaign coordinated efforts among hospitals and donation registries including the Michigan Eye Bank and Gift of Life Michigan in order to grow the donor registry. More than 319,000 people signed up to donate organs in 2010, one-third more than in 2009.

A University of Michigan Health System campaign last year also helped to boost the number of registrants, said Anne Murphy, administrator of the U-M Transplant Center.

During a September-through-Thanksgiving Wolverine-Buckeye challenge, 79,958 registrants signed up for organ donation statewide, Murphy said.

At any given time, 3,000 people in Michigan are waiting for organ transplants. About 1,300 are affiliated with the U-M Transplant Center, Murphy said.

Last week, Brayden was recovering in the pediatric intensive care unit at Mott, watching Dora the Explorer on a laptop. Life with the new liver has gone smoothly so far, his mother said. The transplant took about eight hours. But there could be challenges ahead. Brayden will always have to take drugs to suppress his immune system in order to help his body accept the organ.

Demkowski said she knows little of her son’s donor, other than that the individual was under 35 and the liver did not have to travel far. The liver saved two lives, she said. Doctors used a section of the liver for Brayden and the rest of the liver for a teenage patient at Mott.

U-M has one of the oldest and largest transplantation programs in the country, and U-M surgeons perform transplants of hearts, lungs, pancreases, livers, kidneys and corneas. About 400 to 450 transplants are done at U-M annually, mostly kidney transplants followed by liver, heart, lung and pancreas transplants.

The process for registering for organ donation changed statewide in 2007, said Tim Makinen, communications director for Gift of Life Michigan, the state’s federally designated organ and tissue recovery organization.

It took a dozen years to register 1 million Michigan residents when the process for registration involved a signature on the back of a driver’s license, Makinen said. It’s taken less than four years under the new program to register 1 million potential donors, he said.

To register with the Michigan Organ Donor Registry, go to www.giftoflifemichigan.org, call 1-800-482-4881 or visit any secretary of state branch office.

Juliana Keeping is a health and environment reporter for AnnArbor.com. Reach her at julianakeeping@annarbor.com or 734-623-2528. Follow Juliana Keeping on Twitter.