Should antihepatitis B virus core positive or antihepatitis C virus core positive subjects be accepted as organ donors for liver transplantation?

Abstract

Since the introduction of liver transplantation as a routine surgical procedure for the treatment of end-stage liver disease, there has been an increasing gap between the number of available grafts and the number of patients on the waiting list. This has led transplant centers to expand the donor pool by different means. One of them has been the introduction of living donor liver transplantation. Other strategies include using less than optimal allografts from deceased donors, the so-called marginal donors, which include the use of grafts from older subjects, livers with moderate amounts of steatosis, or from donors with markers of past or current infection with hepatitis viruses who have absent or minimal liver biochemical or histologic injury. In this review, we will focus on the current use of allografts from donors with antihepatitis B core antibody and/or antibodies against hepatitis C virus in cadaveric and living donor liver transplantation.