Factors associated with the postoperative status of donor patients for living donor liver transplantation

Deceased donor liver transplantation has been an established surgical procedure since the 1960s. More recently, the technique of living donor liver transplantation (LDLT) was introduced, and it is being performed with increasing frequency. However, there is a paucity of information on the clinical outcomes of donor patients. In this study, which was conducted at a single university hospital, the relationship between potentially relevant factors (eg, patient characteristics, preoperative status, and operation characteristics) and postoperative developments in donor patients was examined. We used electronic critical pathways, which are charts of medical process that include favorable states (defined as outcomes) to be achieved during the hospital stay of a patient; predefined outcomes that are not achieved are recorded as variances. With the electronic critical pathway system, objective data about the conditions of patients and relevant clinical processes could be collected readily. Using data from the electronic critical pathways for LDLT donor patients and applying multiple logistic regression analysis, we examined factors that were related to the variance of each outcome measure for postoperative developments. Among the various donor characteristics, the duration of the operation was related to variance in 5 types of health outcomes, age and blood loss volume were related to variance in 2 types of health outcomes, and other characteristics (ie, sex, body surface area, operation urgency, and volume ratio of the remnant liver) were related to variance in 1 type of health outcome. In conclusion, the findings in this study may facilitate improvements in the postoperative status of LDLT donor patients. Further studies that incorporate analogous data from other medical facilities are necessary to verify these findings.