A transplanted liver can live more than 100 years

Researchers studied transplanted livers with a cumulative age of more than 100 years. These findings could help increase the lifespan of liver donors, thus expanding the donor category in the future.

The liver is the largest gland in the human body, and helps digest food, store energy, and remove toxins.

The cumulative liver age means the number of years spent in the donor's body, i.e. its age, combined with the number of years spent in the body of the person who received the transplant.

A transplanted liver can live more than 100 years

New surgical techniques

New surgical techniques and advances in ways to reduce the body's resistance to a transplanted organ lead to better outcomes for patients who receive livers from a large, old donor.

The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Texas Medical Center at Dallas and transmedics in Andover, Massachusetts, in the United States, and presented their results at the Scientific Forum of the American College of Surgeons 2022, and it was reported by EurekAlert on 16 This October.

The researchers used the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) to identify livers that had a cumulative age of at least 100 years. Of the 406 livers, 253 were transplanted between 1990-2022, and 25 met the criteria for "durable livers", that is, those with a cumulative age of more than 100 years.

They monitored how long the livers were alive in the recipient, said study lead author Yash Kadakia. " We followed up on livers that had lived more than 100 years."

For long-lived livers, it was noted that the average donor age was high, which is 84.7 years, and the donors also had a low incidence of diabetes.

Donors of aging livers had a low level of transaminases, enzymes that play a key role in the liver, and high levels can cause problems in liver transplants.

Liver flexibility

The authors of the study concluded that the presence of livers over 100 years old reveals the high flexibility of this vital organ in the human body.

"The liver is an incredibly resilient organ," Kadakia said. "We're receiving from older donors, we have better surgical techniques, we have advances in ways to deal with the body's resistance to a transplant, and we have a better matching of donor and recipient factors. All of these things allow us to get Better results.