Effect of Tacrolimus on Survival in Hepatitis C–Infected Patients After Liver Transplantation

Abstract

The observation that cyclosporine inhibits HCV replication in vitro has led some programs to use cyclosporine as the calcineurin inhibitor (CNI) of choice after orthotopic liver transplantation (OLT). Previous studies comparing outcomes with different CNIs used small HCV cohorts or had short-term follow-up. We examined patient survival and fibrosis progression in all HCV-infected adult primary OLT recipients from 1995 to 2004 at the Annette C. and Harold C. Simmons Transplant Institute (n = 516). Patients were categorized by their CNI on day 7 post-OLT, and they were excluded if they died before day 14. Patient and donor age, sex, race, and prevalence of cytomegalovirus infection post-OLT were similar in the tacrolimus and cyclosporine patients. As expected, acute cellular rejection and steroid-resistant rejection were less common in tacrolimus-treated patients. Although no difference in 1-year survival was seen, tacrolimus patients (n = 268) had superior 5-year survival compared to cyclosporine patients (n = 248) (75% vs. 67%; P = 0.02). Fibrosis progression was no different between the groups. In our retrospective analysis of 516 post-OLT patients, tacrolimus improved long-term survival compared to cyclosporine in HCV-infected patients, although it did not impact HCV fibrosis progression.