Post-Surgical Liver Failure

Post-Surgical Liver Failure

Another acute form of liver failure also can occur following a surgical procedure due to:

• Primary graft non-function, which occurs when a newly transplanted liver fails to function. This is a life-threatening medical emergency, and can lead to death if a new organ does not become available quickly.

• Small-for-size or split liver transplant, which occurs when the transplanted liver is functioning but is too small to sustain the patient. This occurs because only a small donor liver was available or a live person donated a portion of their liver for transplantation.

• Liver cancer resection. Primary liver cancer can sometimes be cured by resecting the cancerous part of the liver after which the remaining liver regenerates to full size. Currently, surgeons typically resect only up to 50 percent of the liver in order to avoid death from liver failure. However, more extensive resections occasionally occur, and resection of smaller portions can also lead to liver failure.

There are about 250,000 new liver cancer patients every year in China, many with chronic HepB. Only 20% of the patients can resect the liver by operation, and more than half of them will recur after the operation. In addition, the recurrence rate as high as 70% is still the bottleneck of the development of liver cancer surgery.⁸ The main reason is that incomplete resection and the doctors were fear of liver failure due to big amount of resection.