Overextended Criteria Donors: Experience of an Italian Transplantation Center

The increasing gap between the number of patients who could benefit from liver transplantation and the number of available donors has fueled efforts to maximize the donor pool using marginal grafts that usually were discarded for transplantation. This study included data of all patients who received decreased donor liver grafts between January 2004 and January 2013 (n = 218) with the use of a prospectively collected database. Patients with acute liver failure, retransplantation, pediatric transplantation, and split liver transplantation were excluded. Donors were classified as standard donor (SD), extended criteria donor (ECD), and overextended criteria donor (OECD). The primary endpoints of the study were early allograft primary dysfunction (PDF), primary nonfunction (PNF), and patient survival (PS), whereas incidence of major postoperative complications was the secondary endpoint. In our series we demonstrated that OECD have similar outcome in terms of survival and incidence of complication after liver transplantation as ideal grafts.