Science / Medicine : Partial Liver Transplants Tried

Dutch doctors last week reported six apparently successful cases in which patients underwent an experimental operation to transplant only a part of a liver to back up their failing organs. The procedure could allow more people to survive liver disease by providing an alternative procedure for patients who are too sick to undergo a standard operation in which their liver is replaced with another whole liver, the researchers said.

“It is very promising,” Dr. Onno T. Terpstra, a professor of surgery at the University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.

As many as 5,000 Americans could benefit from a liver transplant each year because their livers are failing, most commonly from chronic hepatitis B infection or cirrhosis of the liver from alcohol consumption.

In the new report, Terpstra and his colleagues said six patients with end-stage chronic liver disease underwent a so-called auxiliary partial liver transplant between October, 1986, and April, 1988. After an average of 14 months of follow-up, all the patients were alive and the transplanted liver sections appeared to be functioning well, the researchers reported.