Factors Associated With Posttransplant Cardiac Outcomes

Cardiovascular disease has become the leading cause of death early after liver transplantation (LT). The aging LT population is accompanied with the increasing prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors such as hypertension, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia. Furthermore, cirrhosis has been known to cause alterations in the systemic haemodynamic system and cardiac muscle dysfunction, systolic and/or diastolic, known as Cirrhotic cardiomyopathy (CCM). Hence, transthoracic echocardiography is required in all LT candidates for preprocedural evaluation and risk stratification. However, traditional echocardiographic indices of cardiac function have low sensitivity. It is unclear whether comprehensive echocardiographic multiparameters, including speckle tracking echocardiograph (STE) and tissue doppler imaging (TDI) can help improve preoperative risk stratification. Therefore, we sought to analyze the ability of clinical and comprehensive echocardiography variables to predict intraoperative and perioperative cardiac events and cardiac mortality in our LT patient experience up to early post-liver transplant.