PHILADELPHIA – Black patients are more likely to be put on a transplant list because of acute liver failure, be listed as status 1, and receive a liver transplant, compared with white patients, according to a recent presentation at the annual meeting of the American College of Gastroenterology.
Jeff Craven/MDedge News
Dr. Lauren D. Nephew
Lauren D. Nephew, MD, MSCE, of Indiana University in Indianapolis, and her colleagues performed a retrospective cohort study of black and white patients with a minimum age of 18 years in the United Network of Organ Sharing database who were wait-listed for a liver transplantation during 2002-2016. They examined patient clinical characteristics, acute liver failure (ALF) etiologies, wait-list status, and posttransplant survival outcomes through Kaplan Meier analysis.
“We really wanted to explore this topic in patients with acute liver failure, some of the sickest patients that we see,” Dr. Nephew said in her presentation. “We wanted to really determine whether or not there were differences in clinical characteristics and etiologies of acute liver failure in patients by race who are listed for liver transplantation.”
“Then, we wanted to compare wait-list outcomes,” she added, such as “differences by race in liver transplantation or wait-list removal because of death or becoming too sick for transplant.”
There were 11,289 patients in the white ALF group and 2,112 patients in the black ALF group; 2,876 (25.5%) of patients in the white ALF and 790 (37.4%) in the black ALF group were listed as status 1, which indicated an expected survival of 7 days or less. There were similar clinical characteristics for the white and black ALF status 1 patients regarding age (34.2 years vs. 36.3 years), Model for End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD) score (34 vs. 36; P less than .001), international normalized ratio (INR) test (mean 4.5 vs. mean 5.0; P = .001), creatinine levels (2.1 mg/dL vs. 1.9 mg/dL; P less than .001), and percentage of patients who were hepatic encephalopathy grade 3 or 4 (60.0% vs. 63.2%; P = .10). However, Dr. Nephew noted significantly higher bilirubin levels in the black ALF status 1 cohort (17.9 mg/dL), compared with the white ALF status 1 cohort (11.3 mg/dL; P less than .001).
The causes for ALF in each group included drug-induced liver failure (white status 1 cohort, 34.1%; black status 1 cohort, 20.6%), autoimmune hepatitis (2.7% vs. 9.4%), Wilson’s disease (0.58% vs. 0.13%), unknown etiology (34.5% vs. 42.5%), and other etiology (22.9% vs. 17%). For patients who underwent liver transplant and wait-list removal, there were no significant differences in wait-list removal “despite black patients being sicker at presentation,” Dr. Nephew said. Black patients were more likely to be listed to status 1 and transplanted at 62% (490 patients), compared with white patients at 53% (1,524 patients). There were 713 white patients (24.8%) removed from the transplant list, compared with 114 (13.8%) of black patients.
“If you are transplanted and you don’t die, then you are likely removed from the list for other reasons, and the most common reason is that you improved and became well, and so white patients were significantly more likely to be removed from the wait-list because of improvement, compared with black patients,” Dr. Nephew said.
In a competing risk analysis, the researchers found the hazard ratio for white patients who were status 1 and removed from the wait-list because of death or becoming too sick was 1.04 (95% confidence interval, 0.89-1.21) and those white patients who were listed as status 1 and then transplanted was 1.2 (95% CI, 1.08-1.30). In a multivariate analysis, the hazard ratio for white patients who were listed as status 1 and transplanted, which contained bilirubin at transplant, was 1.08 (95% CI, 0.98-1.19). Kaplan Meier 1-year survival post-transplant was 82.8% in white patients and 79.6% in black patients (P = .09).
“I think the question that we’ve been asking ourselves is, is this because black patients are presenting later with their acute liver disease and are sicker at presentation, or do they just have worse liver disease inherently on presentation that drove these findings?” Dr. Nephew said.
Dr. Nephew reports no relevant conflicts of interest.
SOURCE: Nephew L et al. ACG 2018, Presentation 59.