A Jacksonville milestone: 1,000th liver transplanted at Mayo Clinic

Monday, October 25, 2004

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Oct. 25, 2004 — Mayo Clinic surgeons marked a special milestone in the operating room at St. Luke's Hospital yesterday when they completed the 1,000th liver transplant in a program born less than seven years ago.

The patient is a 26-year-old woman who suffered from cholestatic liver disease. She is doing well and recovering in the hospital's Liver Transplant Unit.

When the liver transplant program opened in February 1998, 15 transplants were projected for the first year. Instead, the team transplanted 54 livers, and the program has been breaking records ever since. Only 16 out of 122 active liver programs have reached the 1,000th transplant milestone.

Today, Mayo Jacksonville's liver transplant program is among the top five in the country and the largest in the Southeast based on annual number of transplants.

The median waiting time to transplantation at Mayo Clinic is the shortest in the nation at just 1.7 months.

For example, in 2003, 171 liver transplants were done at St. Luke's. Typical liver programs in the country transplanted between 16 and 67 people in that same period, according to the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients (www.ustransplant.org).

Experience, skill, teamwork and a willingness to evaluate every potential donor have led to the program's growth and success.

"Our program's success is due to the steadfast dedication of our team," says Dr. Jeffery Steers, surgical director of the Mayo Clinic liver transplant program. "The level of service we provide to our patients and organ procurement agencies in terms of our availability and responsiveness falls in line with our commitment to our patients. It takes a tremendous amount of sacrifice in the personal and professional lives of everyone associated with this program."

Mayo Jacksonville transplant surgeons have been at the forefront of innovative procedures, including multiple-organ transplants and the rare domino transplant, where a diseased but functioning liver from one critically ill patient is transferred into another while the first patient receives a donated cadaveric liver.

Yet patient survival rates at St. Luke's liver program are better than predicted. Registry data show that 88.23 percent of St. Luke's liver transplant patients were alive one year after transplant, compared to an expected 85.4 percent based on the patients' characteristics. The national average is 86.37 percent. Mayo's 3-year patient survival rate is the highest of all liver programs in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

Patients with chronic, progressive liver diseases such as hepatitis, an inflammation of the liver, are candidates for transplantation when no other effective medical or surgical treatments exist. In 2003, 5,671 liver transplants were performed in the United States, but the need for donated organs far exceeds the supply. More than 17,000 Americans are currently waiting for a liver transplant.

In addition to liver transplantation, Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville offers bone marrow and all other major solid organ transplantation: heart, lung, kidney and pancreas.

Mayo Clinic, with sites in Rochester, Minn.; Jacksonville, Fla.; and Scottsdale, Ariz., is the largest provider of transplantation in the country, performing more than 1,000 transplants annually.

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Mayo Clinic is a multispecialty medical clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. The staff includes 328 physicians working in more than 40 specialties to provide diagnosis, treatment and surgery. Patients who need hospitalization are admitted to nearby St. Luke's Hospital, a 289-bed Mayo facility. Mayo Clinics also are located in Rochester, Minn., and Scottsdale, Ariz. Visit www.mayoclinic.org/news for all the news from Mayo Clinic.

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