Orthotopic liver or multivisceral transplantation as treatment of metastatic neuroendocrine tumors

✍ Scribed by Michael Olausson; Styrbjörn Friman; Gustaf Herlenius; Christian Cahlin; Ola Nilsson; Svante Jansson; Bo Wängberg; Håkan Ahlman

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 186 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1527-6465
• DOI: 10.1002/lt.21056

✦ Synopsis

Liver transplantation can be a therapeutic option for individual patients with neuroendocrine tumors metastatic only to the liver. In this consecutive series of 15 patients (5 multivisceral and 10 orthotopic liver transplantations) with well-differentiated carcinoids, or endocrine pancreatic tumors, we allowed higher proliferation rate (Ki67 Ͻ10%), large tumor burden, and higher age than previous studies. Liver transplantation offered good relief of symptoms, long disease-free intervals, and potential cure in individual patients. The survival of grafts and patients compared well with transplantation for benign disease. The overall 5-year survival was 90%. The recurrence-free survival of both multivisceral and liver transplantation related to the time after transplantation (about 20% at 5 years) despite inclusion of patients with higher risk. In conclusion, the critical prognosticators for long-term outcome still remain to be defined. The experience with multivisceral transplantation for patients with endocrine tumors of the pancreatic head is still limited.