Adult living related liver donors play an essential role in filling the gap of transplants needed due to a heavy shortage of cadaveric donations. Considering that living related donors are healthy individuals at baseline, it is imperative to ensure good outcomes and return to quality of life.

The antiviral drug, valganciclovir, can lower the levels of Epstein-Barr virus in children with liver transplants, according to a new study. About half of young transplant recipients with detectable levels of the virus in their blood responded to a long course of the therapy, with 60 percent maintaining their response when they stopped taking the drug. These findings are in the August issue of Liver Transplantation, a journal by John Wiley & Sons.

Parents of pediatric liver transplant recipients report lower health-related quality of life for their children two years after the surgery, compared to reports from the parents of healthy children. However, reports of family dysfunction fall within the normal range.

The University of Alberta Hospital (UAH) is one of only a few centers in Canada that perform living donor liver transplantation, a surgical procedure developed in the late 1980s that expands the organ donor pool. About 80 liver transplants are done a year in Alberta, 10 of those being living-donor.

Administering inhaled nitric oxide (NO) during surgery helps protect liver transplant patients from organ failure, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).

The most appropriate system for organ allocation for liver transplants is a subject of continuing debate. In the U.S. the Model for End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD) was introduced in 2002 as a way of prioritizing those with the highest risk of mortality and since that time waiting list mortality and waiting times have decreased with no negative impact on post-transplant survival.