Yikes. Wall Street Journal report.
Apparently he had it done 2 months ago in Tennessee. If this is the case, I hope he’s doing well. What’s the typical prognosis for liver transplant patients?
He has been very, very sick for months now with the very real possibility of “it” being fatal. The media just hasn’t reported on it that much. Liver transplants have a good success rate but it depends on what the underlying cause of his condition is and we don’t know that.
My girlfriend had a liver transplant two and a half years ago and is in fantastic health. Long term prognosis is excellent for the most part. There is one guy out there who has been on his transplanted liver for over thirty years. Over 85% survive their first year and like 65% survive for fifteen years.
A lot depends on why they needed the liver in the first place. Those who needed one because of drug or alcohol abuse tend to not last as long because they often trash the hell out of the rest of their body too. My girlfriend had a genetic disease that got her liver but left the rest of her body alone. She’s on medications for her disorder and her long term prognosis is excellent.
From what I have read, Jobs had cancer that started in his pancreas and spread to his liver. Usually, cancer patients don’t get livers because long term prognosis is believed to be poor. Only 10% of the people who need livers get them and the main factor among the many factors that they use to see who gets to the top of the list is long term prognosis. Because of this, I expect his transplant to generate a shit storm of controversy at some point.
Right, he’s been very private about everything. I know it seems like he’s been on death’s door for a while, but sometimes things look worse than they really are. Then again, sometimes things are just as worse as they look, if not more so. I wonder how connected this was to his pancreatic cancer he had a few years ago? He’s still returning to the helm at the end of the month, albeit in a limited capacity.
Don’t die on us Jobsy!
If the media speculation about this being done because his cancer recurred and spread to the liver are correct (which is impossible to say since anyone who actually knows what’s going on shouldn’t be telling the media about it - there are very strict privacy rules for medical information)…well, one study I found about the topic of liver transplants for those kinds of tumors says, "Actuarial survival rate after [liver transplant] was 59% at 1 year, 47% at 3 years, and 36% at 5 years. Survival rates were significantly higher for metastatic carcinoid tumors (69% at 5 years) than for noncarcinoid apudomas (8% at 4 years), because of higher tumor- and non-tumor-related mortality rates for the latter. "
So it really depends on his particular type of cancer.
Hopefully things will go well for him though.
Interesting, thanks for the info hajario. May your girlfriend continue her good health!
Just noting that it’s possible for a living donor to give one lobe of his or her liver for transplant, and the transplanted lobe can grow in size and take over the function of an entire liver. So it’s somewhat less of a problem than if an organ from a just-deceased donor had become available and was shunted off to Jobs rather than (insert poorer person with better prognosis here) potential candidate, but still could raise issues.
Not exactly, Ferret, most people with damaged livers aren’t medically eligible for living donor livers. Livers aren’t like kidneys or bone marrow, it’s easy to get a match because only the blood type needs to be the same. If Jobs could have gone the living donor route, don’t you think he would have gotten one?
I must be missing something - do we know that he didn’t have a living donor transplant? I was just suggesting it as a possibility. That article preview says nothing on the topic, and we also don’t know why he’s sick, last I knew.
Now I see what you were getting at. You’re correct. If he got a living donor there is no controversy. I just asked my gf and based on her anecdotal experience in transplant support groups, maybe 10% of the people who get liver transplants get them from living donors.
One of the things that disqualifies someone from being eligible for a living donor liver is how sick they are and most people are too far gone by the time that they find out that they need a liver. Jobs seemed like he was extremely sick by the time he got his liver so the living donor scenario is a lot less likely.
I think he upgraded to the iLiver; the one with the minimalist packaging and the adjustable bile controls through the nipple.
Yeah, sorry, that wasn’t clear. I was hoping that maybe that was the case to avoid ethical issues (or at least minimize them).
Regarding other transplant reasons, I had a brother-in-law who was hospitalized with a failing liver due to alcoholism (alcoholic hepatitis). He was ineligible for a transplant because he hadn’t been sober for a year - he hadn’t been sober until hospital admission. I got the impression that not only damage to the other systems was a worry, but also the concern that if you got a nice fresh liver to use without being sure you’d dealt with being an alcoholic, you’d go back to the bottle and wreck that one too.
(He did have his kidneys start shutting down too, got pneumonia, all kinds of problems. He was lucky that his liver actually “repaired itself”, his kidneys recovered too; he’s considered somewhat disabled these days but he’s alive and not doing bad at all, and that in fact was his “rock bottom.”)
They base your position on the list on a number of things:
-How sick are you? The closer to death, the higher on the list.
-How likely they believe you are to take care of your health. If you’re an addict and they think that you’ll relapse, forget about it.
-Age. The younger, the better.
-Income. If you won’t be able to afford the anti-rejection drugs, you’re out of luck.
-Family. People with minor children to support get precedence.
-How you damaged the liver. If you did it because of drug or alcohol abuse, all other things being equal, you will be below someone who had a disease that was out of their control.
My girlfriend was 39 when she got hers and had a fifteen year old son. She was maybe a month away from death. She was married to a well to do lawyer. She had a blood clotting disorder that killed her original liver and blood thinning medication counters that disorder. Other than the liver, she had been in outstanding health. She was the golden candidate.
According to WSJ article, Jobs had his transplant done in Tennessee because it has a much shorter waiting time than most states. So it seems he got his new liver from a deceased donor rather than a living one.
(A link to the entire WSJ article can be found by Googling “Steve Jobs” and then clicking on the link six or seven articles down that says “Jobs Had Liver Transplant - WSJ.com”. I tried to copy and post the address here but it reverts to the snippet that requires a subscription to read in full.)
The ironing is delicious!
I can just see him sending out an email on apples internal network, wanted one liver, those of you that are on my shit list, this would be a golden oppurtunity to get back in my good graces.
Declan
I just hope he’s put his affairs in order. Time for a new app in the iLife package: iBequeath.
As to how the liver transplant is connected to his pancreatic cancer, it’s apparently not unusual for aggressive chemotherapy to damage the liver.
The dude’s a bajillionaire. I’m sure he updates his estate on a regular basis, just to be sure.
I’m sure we’ll see a “Steve Jobs” wing of a hospital in Tennessee, or possibly a whole cancer treatment center.