Pretransplant mortality predictors in living and deceased donor liver transplantation

Although there were some reports predicting postoperative morbidity and mortality in patients undergoing liver transplantation, most of them studied deceased-donor liver transplantation (DDLT). In this context, we performed this study to predict early mortality after liver transplantation from preoperative variables in both living-donor liver transplantation (LDLT) and DDLT.

We retrospectively reviewed the medical charts of 159 patients undergoing liver transplantation (LDLT, n = 103; DDLT, n = 56). Then, we identified the factors that independently predicted 30-day mortality using multivariable logistic regression models.

The 30-day mortality and 1-year mortality for DDLT versus LDLT were 30% versus 6% and 39% versus 11%, respectively. In multivariate logistic regression analysis, pretransplant hepatic encephalopathy (odds ratio, 5.594; 95% confidence interval, 1.110-28.194; p = 0.037) in patients with DDLT and serum creatinine (odds ratio, 4.883; 95% confidence interval, 1.296-18.399; p = 0.019) in patients with LDLT were the independent risk factors for a composite of 30-day mortality.

In conclusion, hepatic encephalopathy in DDLT and serum creatinine level in LDLT were the significant pretransplant variables that were related with early death after LT.