Association Between Pretransplant Psychological Assessments and Posttransplant Psychiatric Disorders in Living-Related Transplantation

The authors examined pretransplant assessment in order to predict posttransplant occurrence of psychiatric disorders in living-related transplantation (LRT). Before LRT, the authors administered the Integrated House-Tree-Person Drawing Test (I-HTP) and 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) to 31 donor-recipient pairs undergoing living-related liver transplantation (LRLT) and 65 pairs undergoing living-related kidney transplantation (LRKT). After LRT, the authors examined the occurrence of psychiatric disorders for the recipients and donors. Pretransplant, two psychological indicators,—alexithymia, a lack of verbalized emotion and abnormal projective drawings such as truncated tree representation—were significantly related to the manifestation of paradoxical psychiatric syndrome (PPS) in LRLT and LRKT. The occurrence of PPS was significantly related to recipients’ guilt feelings toward living donors, but these were strongly superseded by recipients’ desires to escape from approaching death just before LRT. These results suggest that pretransplant psychological assessment is useful for predicting posttransplant occurrence of psychiatric disorders.