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Transplant Q&AQuestion: I have a 2½-year-old son who received a liver transplant a little more than 18 months ago. How long is the life expectancy of children with liver transplants? I don’t feel as though I’ve ever received a straight answer on this question.Answer: This is a commonly asked question, but there is no legitimate way to answer it authoritatively since the success of liver transplantation is too recent and the results continue to improve. The majority of children that survive the first year after a transplant are probably destined to live into adulthood. Some will undoubtedly die of complications related to the transplant though, and others will surely live into middle age and longer. The term "life expectancy" is really a misnomer. When people think of a life expectancy of say, 75 years, they think of a bunch of people living into their 70’s and then dying. It doesn’t work like that at all. For every person that dies 50 years early at age 25, two people must live to 100 in order to reach an average life span of 75 years. Knowing the "average" life span of a particular group says very little about how long an individual within that group will live. Today’s methods of maintaining long term graft survival are imperfect, and the methods themselves produce harm. The secret to normalizing life expectancy will be "graft tolerance": the ability to fool the immune system into not attacking the transplanted organ without using chronic immunosuppressive medications. This could be just around the corner (in the next five years), or it might never happen. Science cannot be predicted very well either. Dr. Punch is a transplant surgeon at the University of Michigan and a member of the C.L.A.S.S. Scientific Advisory Committee.
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Children’s Liver Association for Support Services
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