How do living donor and deceased donor liver transplants compare?

In a living donor transplant, the recipient gets part of a liver; in a deceased donor transplant, the patient gets the whole liver, according to liver transplant surgeon Robert Brown, MD, PhD.

Transcript

00:00

Initially, it was thought that recipients of a living donor organ would not fare as well because they only

00:06

got a partial liver graft. [ELECTRONIC MUSIC]

00:19

Research from multiple centers has shown that the outcome of living donor and deceased donor

00:26

are equivalent. Though the deceased donor gets a whole liver, that liver has been removed from the body, has been transported,

00:35

is often from an older individual, and obviously that person had some illness that caused them to die.

00:41

Whereas the living donor is carefully selected, done in a controlled setting, and is moved directly

00:49

across the hall from one operating room to the next. So the real difference between living donor and deceased donor

00:56

has nothing to do with the transplant operation but more to do with the waiting list.

01:02

Because living donors can be scheduled, they avoid waiting time and any chance of dying on the waiting list.

01:10

And research has shown that it can decrease the risk of overall mortality or overall chance of dying by 50%,

01:19

largely by decreasing waiting list death or people getting too sick to undergo a successful liver transplant.