Liver transplantation: Advances and perioperative care

Abstract

Liver transplantation is one of the treatments for many-life threatening liver diseases. Numerous advances in liver transplant surgery, anaesthesia and perioperative care have allowed for an increasing number of these procedures. The purpose of this review is to consider some of the important advances in perioperative care of liver transplant patients such as pre-operative evaluation, intraoperative monitoring and management and early extubation. A PubMed and EMBASE search of terms "Anaesthesia" and "Liver Transplantation" were performed with filters of articles in "English", "Adult" and relevant recent publications of randomised control trial, editorial, systemic review and non-systemic review were selected and synthesized according to the author′s personal and professional perspective in the field of liver transplantation and anaesthesia. The article outlines strategies in organ preservation, training and transplant database for further research.

Keywords

• Adult liver transplantation
• anaesthesia
• hepatopulmonary syndrome
• hepatorenal syndrome
• liver transplantation
• organ preservation
• recent advances
• reperfusion injury