Hello and welcome to the Zero to Finals podcast.

My name is Tom and in this episode I'm going to be talking to you about liver transplant.

If you want to follow along with written notes on this topic,

you can follow along at zero tofinals.com slash liver transplant

or in the gastroenterology section of the zero definals medicine book.

Let's get straight into it.

The most obvious source for a liver is from a healthy person who's just died

and when an entire liver is transplanted from a deceased patient into a recipient,

it's known as an orthotopic transplant.

Ortho translates as straight and topic translates as place.

So it's a transplant where a liver is taken out and a new one is put straight in its place.

The liver is quite interesting because it can regenerate as an organ. Therefore it's actually possible to take a portion of the liver from a living donor and transplant it into a patient and then both people will have their liver regenerate and become two fully functioning individual organs. And this is known as a living donor transplant.

It's also possible to take the liver of a deceased person and split it into two and

transplant it into two individual patients and have them both regenerate to their normal size

in each recipient. This is known as a split donation.

The indications for liver transplant can be thought of in two categories. Acute liver failure or

chronic liver failure. An acute liver failure usually requires an immediate liver transplant,

and these are patients who are placed

top of the transplant list and the most common causes for this are viral hepatitis and paracetamal

overdose chronic liver failure patients can usually wait a bit longer for their liver transplant and they're

put on a standard transplant list and it normally takes about five months for a liver transplant and they're put on a standard transplant list and it normally

takes about five months for a liver transplant to become available. There's a few factors that make

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