Clear mortality gap caused by graft macrosteatosis in Chinese patients after cadaveric liver transplantation.

Abstract

Liver transplantation (LT) is one of the most effective surgical treatment for patients with end-stage liver disease. Steatosis is a contributor for inferior graft quality. But its impact and safety on transplantation was less assessed in Chinese patients. Graft steatosis and related information involved in recipients, donors and surgical procedures were retrospectively collected from 239 patients. Donor macrosteatosis (MaS) caused about 2.14 and 2.80 folds of increment on patient and graft mortality. Dose-response analysis revealed prominent risk of grafts on overall patient/organ mortality when MaS content exceeded 10% (P<0.05). Noteworthy, deaths were only observed in MaS group when concurrent with extremely higher post-transplant alanine aminotransferase (ALT, 64%). However, microsteatosis (MiS) grafts didn't affect outcomes after LT. In a cohort of Chinese patients, MaS had comprehensive effects on post-transplant outcomes with relatively lower safety threshold at 10%. Mortality gap caused by MaS grafts was observed in patients with severer ischemia reperfusion injury. Our study revealled the graft MaS affected the post-transplant outcomes in lower risk cutoff in Chinese patients. Further study is worthy to validate these results and investigate inner mechanism under the phenomenon.