Quality of life and employment after liver transplantation

Abstract

1. In general, the health-related quality of life (QOL) of transplant recipients is impaired before and improves after liver transplantation. 2. Transplant recipients report largest gains in those aspects of QOL most affected by physical health and smaller improvements in areas affected by psychological functioning. 3. No utility-based measures have been used with liver transplant recipients; therefore, the necessary QOL weights for use in cost-effectiveness evaluations of liver transplantation are lacking. 4. Pretransplantation, the percentage of candidates with alcoholic liver disease (ALD) who work is less than that of candidates without ALD. However, there is no difference in rates of employment posttransplantation. 5. No study has described types of wages and benefits associated with jobs before or after transplantation or the extent to which health insurance benefits associated with employment motivate changes in work status. 6. Many studies in this field used nonvalidated heterogeneous instruments to measure QOL and employment, thus limiting the opportunity to combine results across studies and compare outcomes for liver transplant recipients with other patient populations.