Liver patients learn to live again

3:14pm Tuesday 19th February 2008

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Physiotherapist Lynne Burton was diagnosed with liver disease in 1995 at the age of 20 but, looking back, she can see symptoms dating back to her early childhood.

She was tired and itchy all the time. She used to go to bed before 8pm after school and at university she had no energy.

"It was not a life," she says now. But, since having two transplants - there was a problem with the first - in 1999, and despite a car crash which left her wheelchair-bound, she has embraced life.

"If you have had a transplant, you learn the meaning of life," she says.

Lynne, 33, is one of 1,000 patients who have now had liver transplants at the Royal Free hospital, in Pond Street, Hampstead, a milestone celebrated at Alexandra Palace with a special event last Friday.

Set up in 1988 by consultant surgeon Keith Rolles, the liver transplant programme - one of only seven in the country - carries out around 50 to 60 transplants a year.

Kathleen Martin, of Birkbeck Road, Mill Hill, was itchy and tired and suffered from jaundice - yellowing of the skin - when she was eight months' pregnant. Six months later she was diagnosed with primary billary cirrhosis, a liver disease caused by an abnormality of the immune system, and had a transplant eight years later in 1992. The transplant gave the 63-year-old former nurse teacher a second chance.

One day after being discharged, she attended a silver wedding party and the day after that she pedalled around Mill Hill on a bike to strengthen her muscles.

"I took the view that I wanted to resume my quality of life.

"The idea was that I'd been given a chance to live and I was going to do it."

Twenty years ago, a patient undergoing a liver transplant used to have a 70 per cent chance of still being alive within the first year of the operation. But today, due to advances in medicine - including drugs to stop the body rejecting the new organ - the chance of survival stands at more than 90 per cent.

Keith Rolles, head of the Royal Free liver transplant programme, has carried out more than half of the unit's 1,000 transplants.

He says: "If you have had a transplant, you are a patient for life but, we hope, a well patient for life."

Despite medical advances, there are only 11 to 12 liver donors for every million people in the UK, compared with Italy and Spain where there are 25 to 26.

Andrew Burroughs, the Royal Free hospital's consultant physician and hepatologist, explains: "If people realised what happens, I think people would be quite willing to donate.

"But when you are confronted with your relatives' death, it is very difficult."

Lynne says one of the things she noticed after the operation was that she had energy for the first time.

"I'd been given a transplant to have a life.

"I couldn't be more grateful to my donors."

Since her transplant, she has taken up archery, winning gold in her first competition.

Lynne's dream now is to win a gold medal at the 2012 Olympics.