Patients who receive liver transplants often have an increased prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors, and cardiovascular events are a major source of their morbidity and mortality. Due to excellent long-term survival, there is an increasing emphasis on identifying transplant recipients at risk for immunosuppression-related late complications. Understanding each transplant recipient's risk for cardiovascular events is one important consideration.
In search of the best method of estimating a patient's risk of a cardiovascular event, researchers led by Dr. Olaf Guckelberger of the Department of General, Visceral and Transplantation Surgery at Charit Campus Vichow-Klinikum in Berlin, Germany, sought to identify relevant independent variables, as well as the algorithm that would most accurately quantify a transplant candidate's risk of future cardiovascular disease.
The researchers retrospectively studied 303 patients who had received a liver transplant between 1988 and 1994. They gathered clinical and demographic data at six months post-transplant, including age, gender, smoking-status, family history of cardiovascular disease, arterial blood pressure, height, weight, medication and serum levels of creatinine, total cholesterol, HDL-cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol, triglycerides, and glucose after fasting. They then used this data to calculate three es
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Contact: David Greenberg
dgreenbe@wiley.com
201-748-6484
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
1-Mar-2006