Impact of Hepatic Arterial Reconstruction on Orthotopic Liver Transplantation in the Rat

ABSTRACT

Orthotopic liver transplantation (OLT) models in rats have been investigated in many studies, but detailed information on the impact of hepatic artery (HA) reconstruction on postoperative factors remains to be investigated. HA reconstruction also requires advanced skills. The effect of the reconstruction of the HA by a hand-suture technique in rats with a whole-liver syngeneic graft was investigated. Long-term survival, histopathological assessment, immunohistological evaluation, and blood biochemistry were investigated until postoperative day (POD) 28. From the early postoperative period, significant differences between OLTs with or without HA reconstruction were found in graft parenchymal damage, induction of apoptosis, and transaminase levels, though survival curves and the coagulation profile showed no differences. In OLT without HA reconstruction, biliary proliferation was decreased at POD 5–14, and total bilirubin level was increased at PODs 10 and 14. The study indicates that HA reconstruction is required for reliable OLT in rats.

Keywords: :

• hepatic artery
• microsurgery

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are very grateful to Dickson W. Dennis, Monica Castanedes-Casey, Virginia R. Phillips, Linda G. Rousseau, and Melissa E. Murray (Department of Neuroscience, Mayo Clinic Florida, Jacksonville, FL, USA) for their diagnostic and technical support in the histopathological and immunohistological assessments; Xiangdong Zhao (Innovation Center for Immunoregulation Technologies and Drugs, Transplant Tolerance Unit, Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto, Japan) and Naoko Kamo (Dumont-UCLA Transplantation Research Center, Department of Surgery, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA) for their surgical advice; Takayuki Kogure (Division of Gastroenterology, Department of Internal Medicine, Tohoku University Hospital, Sendai, Miyagi 980–8574, Japan) for his help with the statistical analyses; and Masafumi Ueno (Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, University of Florida College of Medicine, Jacksonville, FL, USA) for his help in the measurement of PT-INR.

Declaration of interest: The authors declare no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

ABBREVIATIONS
OLT	=	orthotopic liver transplantation
HA	=	hepatic artery
POD	=	postoperative day
AST	=	aspartate aminotransferase
ALT	=	alanine aminotransferase
T-Bil	=	total bilirubin
PT-INR	=	international normalized ratio of prothrombin time
H-E	=	hematoxylin-eosin
TUNEL	=	transferase-mediated deoxyuridine triphosphate nick-end labeling
caspase	=	cysteine aspartic acid protease
CK7	=	cytokeratin 7