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A Daughter’s Gift: UNC Hospitals Performs First Living Donor Liver Transplant in Twenty Years

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Meredith Stiehl received a partial-liver transplant from her daughter Kenan, the first-ever living donor procedure at UNC Hospitals to be conducted in twenty years. Chirag Desai, MD, FACS, led the care team that performed the procedure.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – The bond between a mother and daughter is quite special. This is particularly true for Meredith Stiehl, 57, who recently received a liver transplant from her 26-year-old daughter, Kenan Stiehl, to treat life-threatening liver disease.
Read more from the UNC Health and UNC School of Medicine Newsroom.

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After a liver transplant changed his life, UTSW postdoc is inspired to help others

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Dr. Ahmad Anouti advocates for organ donations as he trains to become a transplant hepatologist

DALLAS – Feb. 22, 2023 – As a child in Beirut, Ahmad Anouti, M.D., endured dozens of medical procedures, hundreds of medications, and numerous setbacks before a liver transplant at age 16 saved his life.

Today, Dr. Anouti is a postdoctoral research fellow at UT Southwestern Medical Center specializing in hepatology, which is the study of the liver. He’s also an advocate for organ transplantation and strives to raise awareness of UT Southwestern and the work being done by its Division of Digestive and Liver Diseases. Read more from UT Southwestern Medical Center.

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Pre-liver transplant frailty increases risk for worse global functional health outcomes

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Physical frailty before liver transplant correlated with poor functional status and health-related quality of life 1 year after surgery among patients with cirrhosis, according to research published in JAMA Surgery.

“As the quantity of posttransplant years of life improves, it is crucial to better understand the factors, particularly those that are modifiable, that contribute to patients’ quality of life during those posttransplant years,” Jennifer C. Lai, MD, MBA, associate professor of medicine and endowed professor of liver health and transplantation at the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues wrote.  Read more in Healio.

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Can a Nationwide Liver Paired Donation Program Work?

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For a patient who needs a liver, living donation offers an alternative to staying on a list of over 10,000 people waiting for a liver transplant. But what happens when your donor is not a match? To expand the number of living liver donations in the United States, the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) has launched the first national paired liver donation pilot program in the United States. Read more in Medscape.

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Pre-liver transplant frailty increases risk for worse global functional health outcomes

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Physical frailty before liver transplant correlated with poor functional status and health-related quality of life 1 year after surgery among patients with cirrhosis, according to research published in JAMA Surgery.

“As the quantity of posttransplant years of life improves, it is crucial to better understand the factors, particularly those that are modifiable, that contribute to patients’ quality of life during those posttransplant years,” Jennifer C. Lai, MD, MBA, associate professor of medicine and endowed professor of liver health and transplantation at the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues wrote. Read the full story in Healio.

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Liver-transplant patient demographic info can help predict hospital readmission

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Brittany Damazio led study as an undergraduate researcher during the pandemic

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The age, sex, and other demographic information about a patient can be used to predict whether they will need to be readmitted following a liver transplant, according to new research spearheaded by recent Penn State graduate Brittany Damazio.

Damazio led the analyses and writing on a recent publication in the Journal of Liver Transplantation as an undergraduate researcher in health policy and administration. In the paper, the researchers identified common traits among people who were readmitted to the hospital within 30 days following a liver transplant. This work could one day help doctors prevent readmissions. Read more from Penn State News.

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Death Risk in Pediatric Liver Transplant Patients After Transfer to Adult Healthcare

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For a study, researchers sought to examine the relationship between demographic, psychological, and clinical characteristics and mortality or loss to follow-up in pediatric liver transplant recipients. It was the goal to learn more about the causes of the health gaps that are already known to exist in transplant outcomes, and to locate any risk factors that might be altered before the operation. From 2000 to 2015, the lives of children who received liver transplants at a major tertiary transplant facility were studied in a retrospective cohort study and then transitioned to adult treatment. Read more in Physician’s Weekly.

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‘He Saved My Life’: Honoring a Pioneer Transplant Surgeon for 35 Years of Saving Lives

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Jenny Tice, 34, makes sure to live each day to its fullest. She is a Bay Area native, works in finance in San Francisco, lives an active lifestyle, and volunteers. However, these milestones wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Carlos Esquivel, MD, chief of the Division of Transplantation at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health. He saved her life, twice.

“When I was 8 months old, I turned jaundiced and wasn’t gaining weight,” she says. “That’s when they found out that there was something wrong.” Read more from Stanford Medicine.

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