Background: The use of HCV-positive livers for HCV-positive recipients is becoming more common. Our aim is to\nevaluate long-term outcomes in liver transplant recipients transplanted with HCV antibody-positive organs.\nMethods: From the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients (1995ââ?¬â??2013), we selected all adult liver transplant\nrecipients with HCV, and cross-sectionally compared long-term graft loss and mortality rates between those who\nwere transplanted from HCV antibody-positive (HCV+) vs. HCV antibody-negative donors.\nResults: We included 33,668 HCV+ liver transplant recipients (54.0 Ã?± 7.7 years old, 74.1% male, 71.0% white, 23.6%\nwith liver malignancy). Of those, 5.7% (N = 1930) were transplanted from HCV+ donors; the proportion gradually\nincreased from 2.9% in 1995 to 9.4% in 2013. Patients who were transplanted from HCV+ positive donors were\nmore likely to be discharged alive after transplantation (95.4% vs. 93.9%, p = 0.006), but this difference was completely\naccounted for by a greater proportion of HCV+ donors in more recent study years (p = 0.10 after adjustment for the\ntransplant year). After transplantation, both mortality in HCV patients transplanted from HCV+ donors (12.5% in 1 year,\n24.2% in 3 years, 33.0% in 5 years) and the graft loss rate (2.2% in 1 year, 4.8% in 3 years, 7.5% in 5 years) were similar to\nthose in HCV patients transplanted from HCV-negative donors (all p > 0.05).\nConclusions: Over the past two decades, the use of HCV+ organs for liver transplantation has tripled. Despite this, the\nlong-term outcomes of HCV+ liver transplant recipients transplanted from HCV+ donors were not different from those\nwho were transplanted with HCV-negative organs.
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