Quality of life improvements are similar compared to lung, kidney and heart transplantation. Heterogeneity between studies precluded quantitative analysis. Conclusions: Liver transplantation confers specific long-term quality of life and functional benefits when compared to pre-operative status. This information can assist in providing a more complete estimate of the overall health of liver transplant recipients and the effectiveness of surgery. Guidelines for future studies are provided.
M ZUBAIR, C CONNELLY, L AYRES, C WELMAN, S GALHENAGE, KOYA AYONRINDE, J OLYNYK, L MANNING, L MOLLISON Departments of Medicine, Gastroenterology, Infectious Diseases and Radiology, Fremantle Hospital, Fremantle, WA, 6160 Background and Aims: Assessment of liver fibrosis is integral to the work up for patients with chronic viral learn more hepatitis. Liver biopsy remains the gold standard for assessing this but is invasive and costly. Non-invasive methods for assessing the same are becoming increasingly
popular. Typically, transient elastography/Fibroscan™ (FS) and liver ultrasonography are performed separately. Recently short/shear wave elastography (SWE) has become available and has been shown check details to correlate well with liver biopsy in chronic hepatitis B and C. We aimed to audit the correlation of between SWE and FS in a cohort of patients with viral hepatitis. Methods: A retrospective analysis of 40 patients with hepatitis B or C who were assessed with FS and routine ultrasound including SWE were examined retrospectively. SWE was performed using a Philips EPIQ Ultrasound™ system to a set protocol. Statistical comparison of kPa values obtained from the two methods was performed using Spearman-rank and Pearson correlation tests. Results: 10 patients had hepatitis B; 30 patients had hepatitis C. For hepatitis B correlation between FS and SWE was high (Spearman r = 0.62, P = 0.06; Pearson r = 0.88, P = 0.009). For hepatitis C, similarly a good correlation
was observed (Spearman r = 0.45, P = 0.01). Conclusions: There is at least a moderate correlation between FS and SWE in this MCE group of patients. Agreement is better for hepatitis B than hepatitis C. Further exploration of correlation between the tests including comparison of fibrosis stages obtained by the two methods is required. K LIU,1,2 R WANG,1 M WELLS,3 S STRASSER,1,3 G MCCAUGHAN,1,3 C CORTE,1,2 RWL LEONG1,2 1Faculty of Medicine, The University of Sydney, Sydney, 2Gastroenterology and Liver Services, Concord Hospital, Sydney, 3AW Morrow Gastroenterology and Liver Centre, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney, Australia Introduction: Primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) is an uncommon but often progressive inflammatory fibrotic stricturing disease of the biliary tree that may lead to cirrhosis and liver failure requiring orthotopic liver transplantation (OLT). The 2012 Australian prevalence of PSC was estimated to be 872 cases (1).