Greek Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis announced with a post on X that Greece successfully performed the first reduced-size liver transplantation on Wednesday.
Reduced-sized liver transplantation is a surgical technique used in liver transplants where a donor liver is surgically reduced in size right before transplantation to better fit the recipient, usually a child or small adult.
The procedure was carried out on a 22-year-old patient from Thessaly suffering from a rare metabolic disorder at the General hospital of Athens LAIKO.
Originally considered for a live donor transplant from his mother, the patient required a reduced-size graft due to compatibility issues.
Georgiadis closed off his post saying that “the implementation of partial transplants in Greece, whether through living donor liver transplants or reduced-sized grafts, expands the possibilities for liver transplantation in our country. It provides a solution to the health challenges faced by certain patients and lays the groundwork for the re-establishment of a pediatric liver transplant program in Greece.”
This procedure brings hope for organ donation in Greece as the country has been a contender for last place in the field for decades. While the average organ donation rate in Europe in 2022 was 46.7 per million population (PMP), in Greece it was 6.6 PMP. Similarly, while only 45 organs were donated in Greece in 2018, 344 were donated in both Belgium and Portugal (countries with a similar-sized population).
