Essential reading from the editor’s desk

With summer 2021 slowly approaching and vaccination campaigns catching up, exit strategies from the currrent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic are being laid out, providing hope for a better second half of 2021 and 2022. This crisis has had a profound impact on the functioning of our gastroenterology services, including the challenges of developing numerous strategies to protect both our patients and staff from COVID-19 (1). Also our transplant programmes have suffered from this crisis through organ donor shortage and reduction of capacity of the operating theatre and the intensive care unit. Last year, the Belgian Liver Intestine Transplant Committee (BeLIAC) have published their recommendations in an attempt to mitigate the negative effects of the pandemic on the transplant programmes and highlighted the limited number of donor organs as the most important roadblock to move forward in liver transplantation (2). In the current edition the Acta, Dr. Dahlqvist and colleagues from the BeLIAC further elaborate on potential strategies to expand the pool of transplantable organs, especially in light of emerging indications for life-saving liver transplantation such as refractory alcoholic hepatitis, hepatocellular carcinoma outside the standard indications and liver-metastasized colorectal cancer (3).

Keywords: portal vein thrombosis, liver transplantation, Crohn’s disease, diverticular-associated colitis.