[Spirit Dancer]

The demand for liver transplantation has continued to
increase in the last three decades and has far outpaced
the supply of organs from deceased donors. In the U.S.
alone, more than 90,000 people are on transplant waiting
lists, whereas the number of deceased liver donors
in recent years has remained stable at approximately
6,000.1 More than 18,000 patients are waiting
for livers. Allocation of these precious, life-saving organs
is currently dictated by patients’ scores on the
Model for End-stage Liver Disease, a disease-severity
index based solely on bilirubin, creatinine, and international
normalized ratio. The Model for End-stage
Liver Disease (or, in children, the Pediatric End-stage
Liver Disease model) allows prioritization of the sickest
patients.2,3 Still, death on the waiting list in 2004 was
greater than 10%.1
Faced with these statistics, physicians caring for
these patients have endeavored to perform transplants
with partial liver grafts from healthy, volunteer live donors.
An estimated 7,000 living donor liver transplants
have been performed worldwide.