Quality of Life in Pancreas Transplantation

Quality of Life for individuals with Insulin Dependent Diabetes Mellitus (IDDM) can be severely impaired by acute and chronic complications of the disease.

Solid organ pancreatic transplantation restores endocrine pancreatic function. However, it is also burdened by high perioperative morbidity and mortality.

Clinical benefits and risks of this intervention have been extensively clarified, but our knowledge about quality of life gain, often mentioned among the assets of transplantation, is still limited.

This study aims to quantify the impact of all forms of Solid Organ Pancreas Transplantation on quality of life (QOL).

Rationale of the study:

There are 3.5 million people in the United Kingdom diagnosed with diabetes. Their life expectancy is significantly reduced when compared to non-diabetic population. The long standing poor metabolic control causes a cluster of complications such as metabolic instability, cardiovascular disease, nephropathy, retinopathy and neuropathy which have a major impact on the clinical and social wellbeing of these individuals.

Solid organ pancreatic transplantation restores endocrine pancreatic function, but it is still burdened by significant perioperative morbidity and mortality.

There are other less invasive transplant options we can offer to this cohort of patients. The most common are Kidney Transplant Alone (KTA) from deceased or living donor in the diabetic and uremic patients and Islets Transplant (IT) for those with hypoglycemia unawareness and preserved renal function.

Although current literature suggests that the less invasive approaches may be less effective in the long term, potentially they could resolve the most compelling clinical needs at a lower surgical risk.

There is now a general consensus that the surgical risks of pancreatic solid organ transplantation must be weighed against clinical outcomes as well as QOL gain

Aims of the study:

This study aims to quantify QOL trajectory pre- and post- pancreas transplantation and identify correlations between QOL and clinical outcomes. The data collected will be utilized to understand which forms of solid organ pancreas transplantation are associated with greater/ lesser QOL gain and to compute a cost effectiveness analysis of this intervention.

Methods:

The core of the study will be a prospective quasi-experimental design focusing on QOL outcomes for patients on the pancreas transplant waiting-list at Oxford University Transplant Centre.

Patients active on the Oxford Transplant Centre Pancreas Transplant Waiting list will be invited to take part to this study.

Participants will be requested to complete one set of validated generic and disease specific (diabetes and kidney failure where applicable) QOL questionnaires pre-transplantation and at three time points post-transplantation: 6 weeks, 6 months and 1 year. The research team will collect clinical and hospital usage data at the same time points.

At the end of data collection, statistical analysis will aim to discern overall QOL changes in terms of Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY), but also whether different cohorts of pancreas transplant recipients (SPK, PAK, and PTA) have different QOL outcomes and in which domains of QOL they differ.

A cohort of patients who receive a PT will be matched to a cohort of patients who remain on the PT waiting-list. Matching estimators, including Propensity Score and Coarsened Exact Matching, will be used to achieve covariate balance between the synthetic treated and control groups in order to estimate the causal effect of QoL changes post-transplantation.

Cumulative hospital costs of care by treatment group will be analysed using appropriate regression methods for non-normal, continuous outcomes. Continuous QOL outcomes will be analysed using generalised linear models.

Eligibility Criteria:
Inclusion Criteria:

* Willing and able to give informed consent for participation in the study
* Insulin Dependent Diabetic Patients
* Active on Pancreas Transplant Wait List

Exclusion Criteria:

* Not fluent in English