Question about liver transplantation.

Factual Questions
1

I was just wondering the following things about treatment of liver disorders.

  1. What is the average life expectancy for an otherwise healthy patient with fulminant (acute) liver damage/disorder

  2. How long is the average wait for a donor (in England)

  3. If a dead donor match cannot be found what are the chances of a successful partial liver transplant from one living person to another?

Google has proven fruitless, then again I probably don’t know how to use it :slight_smile:

Any and all help is gratefully appreciated.

Regards,
Gomez.

2

Wish I could help, but I have been doing research on that as well and there doesn’t seem to be any simple answers.

My SO is undergoing a TIPS procedure (a kind of liver bypass) this Thursday and I have spent countless google hours to see what information there is.

Try again with google and be as specific as you can:
“Liver Donor Average Wait UK”
At least that should give you some good links to start off with.
Re: Life expectancy questions…perhaps it is for the best, but I doubt very much you will find anything. Either no one wants to commit to putting the info in black and white, or there simply are not enough guidelines to give information like that “in general” - my guess is that a lot of factors come into play - age of patient, attitude, progression of disease, treatments available locally, luck or bad luck. I guess no doctor or medical facility wants to go down on record as saying “average patient only has ## months to live.”

There seem to be some great success stories with partial liver transplants, but there are some not-so successful stories as well. I would imagine this would be a course of last resort.

Best of luck to whomever you are refering to. I have seen the pain and agony liver disease causes.

3

1)In the U.S. 5 year Patient Survival rate at 5 years is about 88%. Longer than that the data is iffy. But Rejection is currently believed to flatline after 5 years. The Longest still functioning Liver after tx is 30 years. However keep in mind that a) Liver Transplants only really started in earnest circa 1970 and b) that the real test is current classes of immunosuppressive drugs: and they only started being used in the mid-late 80’s. The data simply isn’t there for long term transplant issues. Here are some Quality of life Transplant websites

http://www.livermd.org/faqs_posttx.html

http://www.transweb.org/index.htm
2) I don’t know about the UK. Here is a database for the U.S. Latest is 250 days for a Liver
http://www.unos.org/data/about/viewDataReports.asp
How are Livers allocated in the UK? Can you check that organization?

  1. IIRC Living Related Donor transplants, after a couple of initially rocky years, are now nearing the success levels of cadaver tx.