Metabolic Syndrome After Liver Transplantation: Five-Year Prevalence and Risk Factors

Survival after orthotopic liver transplantation (OLT) has increased over the last decades, focusing on the metabolic complications that contribute to patient morbidity and mortality. The aim of our study was to describe the prevalence of metabolic syndrome (MS), its components, and its associated factors in patients who underwent OLT in a hospital in Spain. From November 2001 to January 2014, we performed 415 transplantations in 386 patients. We analyzed 204 patients with a minimum follow-up of 1 year (77.6% were male and the mean age was 54.2+/-9.5 years). The most frequent etiology was alcohol (41%), followed by hepatitis C virus (29.1%). The indication was decompensated cirrhosis in 51.8% and hepatocellular carcinoma in 34%. According to modified National Cholesterol Education Program-Adult Treatment Panel-III (NCEP-ATP III) criteria, 5 years post-transplantation MS was diagnosed in 38.2% of patients. Significant independent predictors of post-transplantation MS on logistic regression analysis were as follows: pretransplantation obesity (odds ratio [OR], 3.09; P = .056), 1-year post-transplantation obesity (OR, 3.95; P = .009), pretransplantation diabetes (OR, 4.63; P = .001), 1-year post-transplantation diabetes (OR, 3.01; P = .015), 1-year post-transplantation hypertension (OR, 1.85; P = .176), and hypertriglyceridemia at the first year after transplantation (OR, 2.32; P = .063). In our center the prevalence of MS at 5 years after OLT is slightly lower than published. The most important risk factors were obesity and diabetes (both pretransplantation and the first year post-transplantation).