Shah NJ, Russo MW. Is it time to rethink combined liver-kidney transplant in hepatitis C patients with advanced fibrosis? World J Hepatol 2017; 9(5): 288-292 [PMID: 28261386 DOI: 10.4254/wjh.v9.i5.288]
Corresponding Author of This Article
Niraj James Shah, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Department of Medicine, Division of Digestive Diseases, the University of Mississippi Medical Center, 2500 North State Street, Jackson, MS 39216, United States. jnshah@umc.edu
Research Domain of This Article
Transplantation
Article-Type of This Article
Meta-Analysis
Open-Access Policy of This Article
This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
World J Hepatol. Feb 18, 2017; 9(5): 288-292 Published online Feb 18, 2017. doi: 10.4254/wjh.v9.i5.288
Is it time to rethink combined liver-kidney transplant in hepatitis C patients with advanced fibrosis?
Niraj James Shah, Mark W Russo
Niraj James Shah, Department of Medicine, Division of Digestive Diseases, the University of Mississippi Medical Center, Jackson, MS 39216, United States
Mark W Russo, Transplant Center-Carolinas Medical Center, 6th Floor Morehead Medical Plaza, Charlotte, NC 28024, United States
Author contributions: Both the authors contributed to the manuscript.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding this manuscript.
Data sharing statement: No additional data are available.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Niraj James Shah, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Department of Medicine, Division of Digestive Diseases, the University of Mississippi Medical Center, 2500 North State Street, Jackson, MS 39216, United States. jnshah@umc.edu
Telephone: +1-601-9844540 Fax: +1-601-9844548
Received: September 27, 2016 Peer-review started: September 28, 2016 First decision: October 31, 2016 Revised: December 4, 2016 Accepted: December 16, 2016 Article in press: December 19, 2016 Published online: February 18, 2017
Core Tip
Core tip: Individuals with chronic hepatitis C with advanced fibrosis and kidney failure who undergo kidney transplant alone are believed to have lower long-term survival. Surprisingly, we have only a few studies with inconsistent results. The concern about isolated-kidney-transplant alone is that the liver disease would progress to decompensated cirrhosis and liver failure in the setting of immunosuppression after kidney transplant. Earlier, interferon was associated with low virologic cure and high adverse events including graft rejection. However, with development of newer directly acting anti-virals we wish to invite our readers to reconsider the need for a combined liver-kidney transplant in hepatitis C patients with advanced fibrosis or compensated cirrhosis.
