by Connor McCleskey

Posted on July 25, 2013

A study by the Boston Children’s Hospital, published online in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, suggests that split liver transplantation does not increase the risk of liver failure in either recipient.

The liver, different from any other human organ, has amazing regenerative capabilities: just 25% of the organ can regrow into a whole, functioning liver. Because of this, researchers theorized that a recipient did not necessarily need to receive a complete liver from a donor in order to successfully transplant the organ. Instead, the donated organ could be split, with an adult recipient receiving 2/3 of the donated liver, and a pediatric patient receiving the other third. Children, due to their smaller size, need much less liver capacity than adults. Allowing this split liver procedure to take place would greatly increase the number of lives saved by liver transplantation, allowing children to jump to the top of organ lists.

Dr. Heung Bae Kim, the lead author of the study, and director of Boston Children’s Hospital’s Pediatric Transplant Center said, “Infants waiting for a donor liver have the highest wait list mortality of all candidates… If we can increase the number of split livers to just 200 a year (less than 4% of transplanted livers) it would save virtually every child waiting for a new liver.”

The study analyzed records from the United Network for Organ Sharing, examining the survival rates of whole organ transplant versus split transplants. They found that “with the exception of a small, very sick population of patients, adults who receive a split graft can expect to far as well as those who received a whole organ… There’s no reason not to accept it.”

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