Intraoperative Hepatic Blood Inflow Can Predict Early Acute Kidney Injury following DCD Liver Transplantation: A Retrospective Observational Study

PURPOSE: Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a major and severe complication following donation-after-circulatory-death (DCD) liver transplantation (LT) and is associated with increased postoperative morbidity and mortality. However, the risk factors and the prognosis factors of AKI still need to be further explored, and the relativity of intraoperative hepatic blood inflow (HBI) and AKI following LT has not been discussed yet. The purpose of this study was to investigate the correlation between HBI and AKI and to construct a prediction model of early acute kidney injury (EAKI) following DCD LT with the combination of HBI and other clinical parameters. METHODS: Clinical data of 132 patients who underwent DCD liver transplantation at the first hospital of China Medical University from April 2005 to March 2017 were analyzed. Data of 105 patients (the first ten years of patients) were used to develop the prediction model. Then we assessed the clinical usefulness of the prediction models in the validation cohort (27 patients). EAKI according to Kidney Disease Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) criteria based on serum creatinine increase during 7-day of postoperative follow-up. RESULTS: After Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) regression and simplification, a simplified prediction model consisting of the Child-Turcotte-Pugh (CTP) score (p=0.033), anhepatic phase (p=0.014), packed red blood cell (pRBC) transfusion (p=0.027), and the HBI indexed by height (HBI/h) (p=0.002) was established. The C-indexes of the model in the development and validation cohort were 0.823 [95% CI, 0.738-0.908] and 0.921 [95% CI, 0.816-1.000], respectively. CONCLUSIONS: In this study, we demonstrated the utility of HBI/h as a predictor for EAKI following DCD LT, as well as the clinical usefulness of the prediction model through the combination of the CTP score, anhepatic phase, pRBC transfusion and HBI/h.