Retrospective Cohort Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2017. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Hepatol. Dec 28, 2017; 9(36): 1315-1321
Published online Dec 28, 2017. doi: 10.4254/wjh.v9.i36.1315
Recent trends in liver transplantation for alcoholic liver disease in the United States
Catherine E Kling, James D Perkins, Robert L Carithers, Dennis M Donovan, Lena Sibulesky
Catherine E Kling, James D Perkins, Lena Sibulesky, Division of Transplant Surgery, Department of Surgery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, United States
Robert L Carithers, Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Department of Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, United States
Dennis M Donovan, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, United States
Author contributions: Kling CE, Perkins JD and Sibulesky L designed the research; Kling CE, Perkins JD, Carithers RL, Donovan DM and Sibulesky L performed the research; Kling CE and Perkins JD analyzed the data; Kling CE wrote the paper; Kling CE, Perkins JD, Carithers RL, Donovan DM and Sibulesky L critically revised the manuscript for important intellectual content.
Institutional review board statement: This study met expedited review criteria as approved by the University of Washington Institutional Review Board.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All the authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.
Data sharing statement: Statistical code and dataset available from the corresponding author at lensasi@uw.edu.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Lena Sibulesky, MD, Assistant Professor of Surgery, Division of Transplant Surgery, Department of Surgery, University of Washington, 1959 NE Pacific St., Box 356410, Seattle, WA 98195, United States. lensasi@uw.edu
Telephone: +1-206-5986878 Fax: +1-206-5984287
Received: August 24, 2017
Peer-review started: August 25, 2017
First decision: November 1, 2017
Revised: November 7, 2017
Accepted: December 4, 2017
Article in press: December 5, 2017
Published online: December 28, 2017
Processing time: 124 Days and 18 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Although the number of liver transplants done for alcoholic liver disease (ALD) has been stable been 2002 and 2012, since 2013 there has been a significant increase. This increase is seen across all age groups, although the proportional increases are higher for younger patients than older ones. The increase corresponds, but is incompletely explained, by a decrease in transplants for hepatitis C - ALD dual listing. The increase was also seen in most, but not all UNOS regions.