doi: 10.1111/j.1600-6143.2010.03154.xEditorial Unfair Priority for HCC: A Problem Whose Ideal Solution Remains Unsolved

Since the inception of the model for end-stage liver disease (MELD) liver transplant allocation system in 2002, it has been recognized that some diseases exist for which mor-tality risk is not adequately measured by MELD score. For this reason patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) have been assigned an exception MELD score. In this is-sue of AJT (1), Washburn and colleagues attempted to determine whether the current exception score results in an unfair advantage for HCC patients. They used com-peting risk methods to compare rates of dropout from the waiting list between adults who received an excep-tion for HCC, versus those without HCC who were listed with their laboratory MELD score. They found that HCC patients have substantially lower dropout rates than non-HCC patients: 12 % versus 18 % at 1 year after listing