Anesthesia in Liver Transplantation

Abstract

Liver transplantation, is the replacement of unhealthy liver with a new liver allograft. This surgical procedure is now widely common all over the world in various medical centers. The major limiting factors of this surgery is the lack of available donors and decreased chance of appropriate patient selection. Anesthetic management of organ donors includes intensive management of heart beating and brain dead donors; however the augmentation of waiting list for liver and inadequate cadaveric organs resulted in elevated living donor transplantation rates especially for the critically ill patients who will not survive waiting until a brain dead donor is provided, resulting in the growing experience in anesthetic techniques for the management of living donors (Pickett et al, 1994; Lutz et al, 2003).