KOBE — A hospital that opened in November last year in Kobe, western Japan, saw a very high death rate among liver transplant recipients in its first four months of operation, officials at the hospital said today (April 14).

Of the seven patients who received the transplants from living donors at the Kobe International Frontier Medical Centre in the four months through March, four died within one month after their surgeries.

The outcome prompted the Japanese Liver Transplantation Society, a group of liver transplant surgeons across the nation, to launch a probe.

Liver transplants from living donors involve removing part of a healthy person’s liver and transplanting it into a recipient, often the donor’s relative, who suffers from conditions such as liver cancer or biliary atresia — inflammation of the bile ducts causing liver damage.

The patients comprised two Japanese and two Indonesians, including two who were aged under 15 — one Japanese and one Indonesian, the hospital said. The hospital has courted overseas patients to come to Japan for surgery since its establishment.

According to a source well versed in transplantation medicine, the death rate at the hospital is “unthinkably high”, and necessitates close investigation.

“The survival rate for liver transplants from living donors one year after the surgery is usually over 80 per cent,” the source said.

According to the hospital, several of its doctors carried out the transplants. The doctors were questioned by the transplantation society on April 5.

“We gave (patients) prior explanation that the surgery would be difficult,” hospital officials said.

The hospital, led by Kyoto University professor emeritus Koichi Tanaka, a veteran liver transplant surgeon, is part of a medical industry cluster project in Kobe. The city is part of a “strategic special zone” in western Japan designated by the central government where certain regulations are allowed to be loosened to encourage investment in the medical industry.

A Kobe official said the city is aware that patients have died.

“Our understanding is that (the hospital) takes on end-stage patients who have been deemed impossible to treat at other hospitals,” the official said. KYODO NEWS