Whats the survival rate for a liver transplant?
Dr. Robert Brown: Currently the overall survival rate is somewhere in the 90 percent range. So you just have to get those patients the transplant? Dr. Robert Brown: That’s the challenge. Right now in the United States, the likelihood of dying on the waiting list is 20 percent or more, so you have twice as high a chance of dying while waiting for a transplant than in the year after the transplant — particularly for these very, very sick patients, the chance of dying on the waiting list is exponentially higher. So the risk of dying due to organ shortage is higher than the risk of dying with this very, very complex operation. How long are patients usually on the organ donor list for a liver? Dr. Robert Brown: That also depends on how sick they are. We have moved from a time-based waiting system for livers to a severity-based liver system. Now the sickest patients go first, and those that are healthier wait longer, so your waiting time could be as little as a day and a half if you’re in t
