Introduction: After liver transplantation, some complications such as acute or chronic rejection, recurrence of primary disease, thrombus of hepatic artery or vein, and biliary complications seem to be inevitable and may cause morbidity and/or mortality for the patients. Currently, liver biopsy, along with laboratory findings and diagnostic images are required to elucidate the cause of liver dysfunction in these circumstances. This study was performed because there are few studies investigating the relationship between histopathological diagnosis and routine laboratory data in transplanted patients.

Materials and Methods: We retrospectively studied 113 patients who had undergone liver transplantation between January 2002 to April 2012. Liver biopsies were taken in 45 of 113 patients. Patients were divided into the following groups according to their histopatological diagnoses: rejection (42.4%), recurrence of primary disease (27.9%) and non-specific changes (26.7%). The relationship of histopatholigical diagnoses with age, sex, underlying disease and post-biopsy laboratory data (including liver function tests and complete blood count) were compared between the groups.

Results: Autoimmune hepatitis, cryptogenic cirrhosis and viral hepatitis, in order, were the most common underlying diseases necessitating transplantation. The mean age (±SD) of biopsied patients (25 women and 20 men) was 39.6 (±9.86) years and the most frequent pre-transplantation diagnosis was viral hepatitis (18.0%). The mean age of patients with recurrence of viral hepatitis was 50.70 (±5.80) years which was significantly higher than rejection group (35.4±14 years) and group with non-specific changes (36.50 ±15.60) (P = .001). As expected, most recurrences of primary liver disease were observed in patients infected by HCV (P =.002). The patients with rejection showed higher platelets counts in comparison to the non-rejection groups (P = .011). Other laboratory findings revealed no significant difference among the groups.

Conclusions: According to this study, there is a correlation between age and recurrence of viral hepatitis, and also between rise in platelets count and possibility of rejection. However, the clinical application of the latter finding requires further investigation in future studies with larger sample sizes.