Successful Reuse of Liver Graft 13 Years After Initial Transplantation

Abstract

The shortage of organ donors and the increased demand for liver transplantation has led to new strategies to increase the availability of liver grafts for transplantation. Occasionally, previous liver transplant recipients may experience brain death and become organ donors. Although this is a very rare situation, we and others have showed that reuse of liver grafts could be performed successfully within one week after transplantation. Late reuse has, however, not been reported to date. We report the first case in which a liver graft was successfully reused 13 years after the first transplantation.