A team of surgeons at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center is the first in the country to report a fully laparoscopic hepatectomy - the removal of a portion of the liver - from a living adult donor for adult and teenage recipients. The procedure advances transplant surgery and offers hope for addressing the significant shortage of liver donors.
In the September issue of the American Journal of Transplantation, the team, led by Dr. Benjamin Samstein, surgical director of the Living Donor Liver Transplant Program at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia and assistant professor of surgery at Columbia University Medical Center, reports on two of the center's five successful fully laparoscopic hepatectomies from living adult donors for adult and teenage recipients. The group is one of three teams in the world, and the only in the United States, reporting the successful procedure.
"This is a small step, but I think a useful one," says Dr. Samstein. "We're at the forefront of perhaps a new era for living-donor liver transplants."
Despite public awareness campaigns and other efforts aimed at raising the availability of donor organs, there is a nationwide shortage of deceased organ donations. Thus, living donors are an important source of organs to aid patients living with end-stage organ disease, particularly of the liver and kidneys.
The first successful living-donor liver transplant was performed in children in 1989 and subsequently extended to adults. Yet only about four percent of liver transplants are done with a living donor, compared with nearly 50 percent of kidney transplants, Dr. Samstein says. "Even though there is a tremendous need, we're not seeing the same use of living-donor livers as we are of living-donor kidneys," he says.
