Poor Performance Status Predicts Mortality After Living Donor Liver Transplantation.

Background/aims: Performance status may adversely affect living donor liver transplantation (LDLT) outcomes. We present our data regarding performance status and posttransplantation survival in a large LDLT cohort.

Methods: Patients with ABO incompatibility, of pediatric age, with acute liver failure, with hepatocellular carcinoma, and/or who had incomplete data were excluded. Two hundred sixty adults who had decompensated cirrhosis and underwent LDLT from January 2016 to March 2018 were included. Performance status was assessed by Karnofsky Performance Score (KPS). The data are depicted as number, mean (SD), or median (25-75 interquartile range [IQR]).

Results: The cohort included 232 males and 28 females, aged 48.3 ± 9.8 years. Etiology of liver disease was hepatitis B in 33, hepatitis C in 19, alcohol related in 120, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis/cryptogenic in 68, and other etiologies in 20 patients. The mean Child's score was 9.6 ± 1.7, Model for End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD) score was 18.0 ± 5.8, and donor age was 33.4 ± 9.9 years. Forty-one recipients died at median follow-up of 11 months. The KPS was 100 in 6 (no deaths), 90 in 53 (2 deaths), 80 in 93 (12 deaths), 70 in 69 (14 deaths), 60 in 26 (8 deaths), and 50 in 13 (5 deaths) ( = 0.003). The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of KPS to predict mortality was 0.698 ( = 0.000, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.616-0.780), and the best sensitivity (63%) and specificity (67%) were achieved at KPS ≤70. The survivors and nonsurvivors had a significant difference with respect to KPS (77.6 ± 10.9 versus 69.5 ± 10.9, 0.000), age of the patient (47.8 ± 9.4 versus 51.1 ± 11.7;  = 0.047), postoperative infections (53.8% versus 85.3%,  = 0.001), and need of packed red cells transfusion. Multivariate analysis (Cox proportional-hazard) showed KPS (hazard ratio [HR] = 0.96, 95% CI = 0.93-0.99,  = 0.007), postoperative infections (HR = 2.3, 95% CI = 1.04-5.1,  = 0.038), and recipient age (HR = 1.03, 95% CI = 1.002-1.07,  = 0.039) as predictors of mortality.

Conclusion: Pretransplant performance status is one of the predictors of mortality after LDLT.