Neuropsychiatric status after liver transplantation.

A neuropsychiatric study of individuals who underwent successful liver transplantation an average of 3 years previously was conducted to assess quality of life in terms of cognitive capacity and psychiatric status, as well as social and behavioral functioning. Compared with a control group of patients with Crohn's disease, liver transplant patients did not differ on measures of intelligence, language, attention, concentration, spatial organization, memory, or learning. Performance on these diverse aspects of cognitive functioning was in the normal ranges for both groups when compared with normative or standardized test values. The control and liver transplant patients were not different from each other on measures of psychiatric status or social functioning; however, both groups exhibited some disruption of functioning in these two areas when contrasted with normative values. We conclude that relatively young individuals (mean age in this study, 27.8 years) do not exhibit debilitating long-term neuropsychiatric disability after liver transplantation, although some disturbance in social and psychiatric adjustment was observed.