Guangzhou, June 1, 2009 (Xinhuanet)—Recently, the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University successfully carried out a relative-to-relative two living donors liver transplantation for a patient with end stage liver disease.

According to sources, the patient lives in Shenzhen, Guangdong, 34-year-old, and suffers fulminant hepatic failure with hepatic encephalopathy. Due to the critical condition, the patient couldn’t wait for the hospital to provide liver for transplantation. And because relatives couldn’t donate a sufficiently large liver by one person, finally the hospital was forced to carry out the two living donors liver transplantation for the patient.

According to He Xiaoshun, vice-director of the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, and head of the Center for Organ Transplantation, the so-called two donors living liver transplantation works in the way that two donors will each provide part of their livers for the transplantation to a recipient. Two donors living liver transplantation can reduce the risk for the recipient, but the operation is complicated, in need of a full assessment of the physical condition of the recipient. This kind of operation entails the cutting-edge surgery skills in the world's liver transplantation, and the first case of transplantation was carried out in 2001 in Korea. To date, only two cases have been reported in China, but in the southern part of China, two donors living liver transplantation have never been operated before.

Wang Dongping, Associate Professor of the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, said that the main difficulty of this surgery lies in two points: First, the pre-operation assessment needs to be carried out with meticulous care. Because the transplantation works in the way that two donors provide part of their livers to the same recipient, a series of detailed and complete assessment of the condition of the donors’ livers must be done by CT scanning and other medical means, and only in the circumstance that the condition of donors’ livers meet the requirements of the surgery can the transplantation be carried out. Second, the surgery is technically demanding, which requires the removal of part of the livers from the donors and have them transplanted into the recipient’s body, and all kinds of veins, arteries and bile ducts must all be connected. A slight error in the transplantation may lead to failure of the surgery.

At present, the patient is in stable condition and able to eat soft food and to get out of bed to engage in simple activities. The donors are making good recovery, and can again do normal activities.