Retrospective Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2016. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Transplant. Sep 24, 2016; 6(3): 594-598
Published online Sep 24, 2016. doi: 10.5500/wjt.v6.i3.594
Underutilization of palliative care services in the liver transplant population
Priya Kathpalia, Alexander Smith, Jennifer C Lai
Priya Kathpalia, Jennifer C Lai, Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, UCSF, San Francisco, CA 94143, United States
Alexander Smith, Division of Geriatrics, UCSF, San Francisco, CA 94143, United States
Author contributions: All authors contributed to the manuscript.
Institutional review board statement: This study was reviewed and approved by the UCSF Institutional Review Board.
Informed consent statement: This study was reviewed and approved by the UCSF Institutional Review Board.
Conflict-of-interest statement: There are no disclosures or conflicts-of-interest involving any of the study authors.
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: Jennifer C Lai, MD, MBA, Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, UCSF, 513 Parnassus Avenue, UCSF Box 0538, San Francisco, CA 94143, United States. jennifer.lai@ucsf.edu
Telephone: +1-415-4766422 Fax: +1-415-4760659
Received: March 22, 2016
Peer-review started: March 23, 2016
First decision: May 13, 2016
Revised: June 28, 2016
Accepted: July 14, 2016
Article in press: July 18, 2016
Published online: September 24, 2016
Core Tip

Core tip: Without liver transplant, patients with cirrhosis have 50% mortality at 5 years; these patients represent a population that would benefit from palliative care services. Palliative care services are grossly underutilized in older, non-white patients with cirrhosis on the liver transplant wait-list. We encourage early integration of these services into clinical decision-making in the transplant population, with further studies aimed at understanding barriers to consultation.