Mayo Clinic Liver Transplant Program Now Nation's Largest

Monday, April 18, 2005

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — Mayo Clinic is the largest provider of liver transplants in the U.S., having performed 395 liver transplants at its three clinic sites in 2004, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN). Of those 395 liver transplants, 245 were completed at the clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., while 94 were done at the Rochester, Minn., site and 53 at Mayo Clinic in Arizona. Since the procedure was first performed in 1988, Mayo Clinic surgeons performed a total of 2,591 liver transplants through 2004.

Mayo Clinic also leads the nation in living donor liver transplants. Mayo Clinic Foundation performed 32 living donor procedures in 2004, with Mayo Clinic in Arizona performing the most - 17 - at Mayo Clinic Hospital in northeast Phoenix. Mayo in Rochester performed 14 and Mayo in Jacksonville performed one.

These statistics position Mayo Clinic in Arizona as the largest provider of living donor liver transplantation within the Mayo system - and the seventh largest individual program in the country. Mayo Clinic in Arizona, since it began performing living donor liver transplants in March 2001, completed 46 such procedures as of March 9, 2005, and is preparing to recognize its 50th living donor liver transplant within the next month. Living donor liver transplantation occurs when a portion of a liver is removed from a healthy, qualified donor and is immediately transplanted into the recipient - most often a blood relative or a close friend. Because of the liver's unique regeneration qualities, the livers of both the donor and recipient grow to their original size within a matter of weeks.

The living donor procedure is considered one way to alleviate the imbalance between the need for a liver transplant (the only life-saving measure for patients with end state liver disease) and the supply of available organs.

In 2003, 1,700 people in the U.S. died while awaiting a liver transplant and nearly 500 others were removed from the waiting list because they become too ill too withstand the surgery. Nearly 18,000 people in the U.S. are currently on the waiting list for a liver.

"Although the living donor liver procedure is not without risk to the donor, the benefits to the recipient are compelling," notes David C. Mulligan, M.D., chair, Division of Transplant Surgery, at Mayo in Arizona. "Recipients spend less time on a waiting list and surgery can be scheduled when both patients are medically stable enough to undergo the procedures."

More important than Mayo Clinic's rank in terms of the OPTN numbers is its quality, according to Victor F. Trastek, M.D., chair, Board of Governors, at Mayo Clinic in Arizona. "Our liver transplant program has one of the highest survival rates in the country - a testimony to the team's skill, commitment and dedication to patient care."

The OPTN is the unified transplant non-profit network established by the U.S. Congress that maintains statistics and works to increase the supply of donated organs available for transplantation.

Mayo Clinic is a private group practice of medicine dedicated to providing diagnosis and treatment of patient illnesses through a systematic focus on individual patient needs. As a leading academic medical center in the Southwest, Mayo Clinic focuses on providing specialty and surgical care in more than 65 disciplines at its outpatient facility in north Scottsdale and at Mayo Clinic Hospital. The 208-licensed bed hospital is located at 56th Street and Mayo Boulevard (north of Bell Road) in northeast Phoenix, and provides inpatient care to support the medical and surgical specialties of the clinic, which is located at 134th Street and Shea Boulevard in Scottsdale.

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