 Hello, my name is Dr. Sanjay Goval, I am a senior consultant in hepatobiliary surgery and liver transplantation at the Manipal Hospital's Bangalore. The procedure is undoubtedly risky, but the risk that is associated with this procedure is somewhere in the region of between 5 and 10%. You have to remember that liver transplant is being offered only to patients who have a life expectancy without transplant of less than one year and so they are very sick patients. And in this setting to have a survival rate which is in the region of about 90-95% is actually pretty good. Now can complications arise, definitely complications can arise, we can largely group these complications into a set of three, into three different sets. The first is technical complications. So you have to remember that by joining thin arteries, veins and bile ducts together between the donor and the recipient. These joints are quite difficult to perform particularly of the artery which is very narrow and therefore you can get complications related to the stitching of these vessels together. The artery can either get blocked or it may bleed. Similarly the bile duct may either get blocked or it may leak bile out between the sutures. So that is one set of complications. The second set of complications is related to rejection. Now rejection is something which is a big fear in the patient's mind but in fact it is not an uncommon occurrence, it occurs in up to 20-30% of patients who undergo a transplant. But this is a temporary process which needs to be controlled by medication so that the body's immunity and the reaction to the foreign organism are balanced. So it's not anything to worry about and it's very very rare for a patient to actually get into serious complications because of rejection even though it is such a common occurrence. The final group is infections. Because you are on immunosuppression to prevent rejection, patients are at risk of developing infections and this can be quite serious and often life threatening. And infection is probably the single largest cause for complications after a liver transplant. It's important to remember that despite this long list of complications which I have just given you that in fact all these complications constitute only about 10% of patients who undergo a transplant. The risk of dying is less than 10%. In all the other patients who develop any of these complications they are treatable and patients recover and end up having a normal life.