View clinical trials related to Liver Transplantation.
Filter by:To study the efficacy and safety of pitavastatin and PCSK9 inhibitors in liver transplant patients on ongoing immunosuppressive therapy.
Liver transplantation is the only curative treatment of end-stage liver disease, and every year, around 60 patients undergo liver transplantation in Denmark. Immunosuppressive therapy is necessary to avoid rejection of the transplanted organ. Over 90% of adults have been infected with at least one herpesvirus, and it is characteristic for herpesviruses that after a first-time infection, the virus remains dormant in the body and may reactivate, particularly if the host is immunosuppressed. An effective immune response against reactivation depends highly on T cells, but T cells are suppressed by immunosuppressive drugs given to organ transplant recipients. Infections caused by herpesviruses are therefore very common in organ transplant recipients, and particularly two herpesviruses, cytomegalovirus (CMV) and varicella-zoster virus (VZV) pose challenges after transplantation. CMV causes significant morbidity in transplant recipients, contributes to increased mortality and may contribute to loss of the transplanted organ. CMV infections occur in around 40% of liver transplant recipients within a year of transplantation. VZV causes chickenpox at first-time infection and shingles at reactivation. VZV is the second-most common infection in transplant recipients and occurs in around 9% of liver transplant recipients each year. Organ transplant recipients are at higher risk for disseminated disease with complications compared to immunocompetent persons. A limited number of drugs exist that reduce the risk of and treat CMV infection, but they may cause significant adverse events, and drug resistance is emerging. To avoid CMV infection, some liver transplant recipients receive prophylactic therapy, but due to toxicity, new treatment modalities are warranted. This requires knowledge about herpesvirus specific T cell function in liver transplant recipients, which currently is limited. The aim of this study is to provide an in-depth description of the protective immune response and immunological risk factors for CMV and VZV infections in liver transplant recipients and to identify patients at high risk in order to provide a platform for future treatment modalities against CMV and VZV infections in liver transplant recipients.
The purpose of this study is to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of a once-daily medication, fenofibrate (Lofibra), to prevent ischemic cholangiography (IC) in persons who were transplanted with livers donated after circulatory death (DCD).
Immunosuppressive (IS) agents are effective treatment to avoid acute or chronic rejection after pediatric liver transplantation. However, long-term side effect of IS intaking, like infection, kidney dysfunction, metabolic disorders and developmental retardation, should be aware, especially in pediatric recipients. Spontaneous immune tolerance is defined as recipients who cease to taking IS agents due to multiple reasons and the liver function maintained normal. However, the real ratio and safety of immune tolerance in pediatric liver transplantation recipients are rarely known. We would like to investigate the ratio and safety of spontaneous immune tolerance in pediatric liver transplantation recipients during long-term follow-up by constructing an immune tolerance cohort. In this cohort, long-term pediatric liver transplantation recipients with normal liver function and taking monotherapy of IS would be involved. The IS strategy would be monitored and adjusted according to the "Clinical guidelines for pediatric liver transplantation in China(2015)". For recipients suffering refractory virus infection, such as EBV or CMV infection, IS will be minimized to assist the clearance of virus until IS was weaned off. Since most of pediatric liver transplantation recipients may encounter chronic EBV or CMV infection within one year after transplantation, they may need IS minimization during follow-up. During the process of IS weaning off, liver function, immunological status and intrahepatic pathology will be closely monitored. If acute rejection or other complications were found, increase of IS dosage or other related treatments will be applied. Immune tolerance is defined as liver function and intrahepatic pathology maintain normal for more than one year after stop taking IS. At the end of study, the ratio of immune tolerance, acute rejection and all types of complications will be assessed.
Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) is the most common liver malignancy and the third leading cause of cancer death worldwide. Due to the shortage of donor organs and the risk of tumor recurrence after transplantation, the restrictive Milan criteria is the standard guideline for liver transplantation (LT) in patients with HCC and liver cirrhosis. The XXL study (Mazzaferro et al, 2020) is the first prospective trial validating that effective and sustained downstage therapy could expand the selection criteria and improve the prognosis of recipients with HCC beyond Milan criteria. However, the optimal DT protocol is poorly defined, especially in the Asian population. Recently, immunotherapies such as immune-checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) are revolutionizing the management of advanced HCC, the combination of the ICI and other treatment regimens (Anti-VEGF, locoregional therapies et al) produced superior results in patients with advanced-stage HCC compared to those with traditional therapeutic regimens. Therefore, we hypothesize an intensive downstage regimen containing immunotherapy could expand the selection criteria for HCC LT
The investigators attempted to evaluate whether the use of PAC is associated with better clinical outcomes after liver transplantation compared with the case without PAC.
Because of the insufficiency of cadaveric organs and increasing need for organs, the interest in living donor liver transplantation have been greatly increased. The relative reduction of the remaining liver after the operation in Living Liver Donors makes it difficult and compelling to choose a very effective and very safe method in the management of postoperative analgesia. Opioids are the main agents used in the postoperative analgesia of Live Liver Donors. Opioids have serious side effects such as respiratory depression, apnea, circulatory collapse, coma, and death. Both short-term and long-term administration of opioids cause acute opioid-induced hyperalgesia. Ketamine, an NMDA receptor antagonist, has been hypothesized to counter opioid tolerance and NMDA receptor-mediated central sensitization. Various studies and systematic reviews have shown that low-dose ketamine has an opioid-sparing effect in all surgical patients. Although low-dose ketamine has been shown to be beneficial overall in relieving pain, it is unclear whether it has an identified benefit in hepatectomy cases. The aim of this clinical trial was to evaluate the effect of low-dose ketamine administration on postoperative analgesia in living donor liver donors undergoing right hepatectomy procedure.
The investigators attempted to investigate the association of the type of crystalloid administered during liver transplantation with postoperative clinical outcomes. The investigators hypothesized that the greater amount of normal saline or half-saline administered during liver transplantation might be associated with the increased risk of acute kidney injury compared to the balanced crystalloids.
With the increasing shortage of available donor organs, liver transplantation from donation after circulatory death (DCD) has been established in many countries to offer a therapeutic strategy for patients with end-stage liver disease beyond standard donation after brain death (DBD). In France, a controlled DCD (cDCD) program based on the use of normothermic regional perfusion (NRP) during organ procurement has been successfully implemented since 2015. This program has since shown excellent post-transplant outcomes with one-year patient and graft survival rates >90%. However, owing to very strict donor and graft selection criteria nearly one third of all potential liver grafts were not transplanted because of presumed poor quality. Furthermore, survival in cDCD liver transplantation which did not adhere to the current selection criteria was significantly lower (68% vs 94%) compared to the highly selected population. Thus, to further expand selection criteria and reduce discard rates without compromising outcomes, there is an urgent need for novel objective methods to assess graft quality prior to transplantation. Graft quality assessment prior to transplantation has been a key challenge in liver transplantation for decades and still today the decision to accept or decline a graft before transplantation relies for the most part on ''gut feeling" of the procurement or transplant team. Currently, selection criteria for cDCD in France are based on donor data, liver biopsy results and hepatocyte injury markers AST and ALT. While donor data are only indirect indicators of graft quality, liver graft biopsy are highly pathologist dependant and do not provide a dynamic assessment. Hepatocyte injury markers during normothermic perfusion have been shown to only have limited value in predicting post-transplant graft function. In addition, several recent studies have suggested a superior predictive value of specific biomarkers in the liver through metabolomics. There is growing evidence that dynamic graft preservation such as NRP may even allow a direct analysis of key injury metabolites within solid organ grafts. During cDCD procurement, liver grafts are exposed to donor warm ischemia which in combination with static cold storage causes ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI) of the graft during implantation in the recipient. IRI is directly correlated to detrimental post-transplant complications such as primary non function and ischemic cholangiopathy or even recipient death. Studies in animal models have revealed that mitochondria play a major role in IR injury and several mitochondrial signature metabolites for example succinate have been identified in various solid organ grafts such as livers, hearts and kidneys. Based on these results, our team and others have recently identified the release of a small auto fluorescent molecular compound of the mitochondrial respiratory chain, Flavin Mononucleotide (FMN), during the early phase of hepatic I/R injury. Furthermore, FMN has been shown to serve as a surrogate marker for impaired cellular energy production of the liver graft prior to transplantation and enable accurate prediction of post-transplant liver graft viability. Given the natural fluorescence of FMN, a real time quantification method has been established allowing to rapidly assess viability of human liver grafts during the procurement process. Of note, a team from the United Kingdom has validated this real-time FMN quantification during NRP of cDCD liver grafts. Interestingly, since mitochondrial injury is a universal signature of graft injury during the transplant process, FMN has the potential to serve as viability marker in other solid organs such as hearts, lungs and kidneys. In addition, metabolomics approach allow the identification and quantification of many metabolites in a biological system through the use of high-throughput analytical technologies. It can give valuable information about what has, is and will occured in a specific tissu. In Liver transplantation, efforts have focused on studying early event of IR which are known to influence long term outcomes. It is however a complex pathway involving numerous metabolites. Metabolomic is therefore gaining interst in field of LT because it can enlight underlying metabolic process occurring during organ preservation and can lead the way toward a better evaluation of graft quality. Thus, this study aims at developing a robust bio-clinical prediction model of liver graft viability during NRP using in depth metabolomics of perfusate and tissue in combination with available donor and graft characteristics
" Despite the medical and surgical progress of the last two decades, the selection of candidates for liver surgery remains based on old principles and insufficiently sensitive to fine-tune the gesture to patient-specific characteristics and make almost zero risks of postoperative liver failure (PLF) and death. It is therefore necessary to develop new tools that will make possible to predict the evolution of the postoperative portocaval gradient (difference of pressure between portal vein and vena cava), a well-known major risk factor for PLF. Hemodynamic modeling of the human liver during surgery will represent the purpose of this work in order to help the clinicians in their patient's selection and anticipation of postoperative risk. The aim is to develop and validate an hemodynamics mathematical model to predict the evolution of the portocaval gradient in three surgical situations of increasing complexity: portal modulation by embolization, hepatectomy, and small partial graft liver transplantation. The endpoints will be the estimation of the intraoperative post-procedural portocaval gradient and comparison of the estimated portocaval gradient with that measured at the end of the procedure. This pressure differential is performed before parietal closure, after surgery. "