Latest of UCSD’s Liver Transplant Patients Dies During Surgery

A Northern California man suffering from liver failure died in the operating room at UC San Diego Medical Center Wednesday during a liver transplant operation, a hospital spokeswoman said.

The 36-year-old man, whose name was withheld at the request of his family, died as a result of severe blood loss about 10 hours into the surgery by a 17-member transplant team. He was the fourth liver transplant patient at the hospital since it began performing the procedure in March, 1987.

All four of the transplant patients have died. The first two died 7 and 8 weeks after their operations. The third died in the operating room before the transplant was performed, of complications caused by his disease.

Hospital spokeswoman Pat JaCoby said the procedure will be evaluated by the liver transplant program advisory committee and other groups at the hospital responsible for routine surgical review.

JaCoby said it will take several weeks for the review to be completed and that no other liver transplants were scheduled to take place before then.

Although liver transplants are no longer considered experimental procedures, they are among the most difficult of operations, often lasting 12 hours or more.

Patients requiring a liver transplant usually must wait months before a suitable organ is found. The patient who died at UCSD Wednesday had been on a transplantation waiting list for 2 1/2 months.

UCSD Medical Center’s liver transplant program is the only one in San Diego. It began 2 1/2 years after a similar program at Sharp Memorial Hospital ended. The Sharp program was criticized by UCSD officials after the deaths of five out of six patients who received transplants there in 1983 and 1984.

At the time, UCSD officials said the liver transplant program had been too ambitious for a community hospital of Sharp’s size and was better suited to a major university teaching hospital, like UCSD.

The overall one-year survival rate for liver transplant recipients is 60% to 80%.