Pediatric Liver Center Treatments and Diagnostics

At Stanford Medicine Children’s Health’s Pediatric Liver Center, we provide comprehensive and personalized liver treatments for children of all ages through advanced diagnostics and multifaceted treatment options. As part of a respected research institution, our doctors give your child unique access to clinical trials, cutting-edge research, and the latest treatments in our liver care clinics.

Across the West, we are often relied upon to care for complex, challenging childhood liver disease. Many of the children we see are very sick and have multiple health concerns. Some have been turned away by other centers.

What to expect

We provide a variety of liver treatments for childhood liver disease, including medications, surgery, liver transplant, advanced endoscopy, diet and nutrition care, and expert guidance on living with childhood liver disease in order to manage symptoms, prevent complications, and enable your child to live a high-quality life. We support your whole family with resources, including social services, spiritual care, lodging and housing assistance, and more to make your child’s care journey more pleasant.

  • We consider ourselves your child’s medical home, and we provide all the medical care your child with liver disease may need.
  • Your time and your child’s well-being are extremely important to us. To make care convenient for you, we schedule labs and tests on the same day as doctor visits, combine procedures to ease your child’s stress (and limit your trips to us), and, when able, schedule follow-up appointments virtually.
  • Through our Transplant Outreach Program, our providers travel to nearly a dozen locations in the West, bringing care for families closer to home.
  • During evaluations, you can expect to see multiple pediatric experts at once. We always put your child and family at the center of our care.

As nationally leading children’s hospital liver specialists, we have deep expertise in many areas, allowing us to collaborate with other in-house specialists in unique ways to address your child’s precise health needs. This capability sets our care apart. The following are some examples of our innovative partnerships to care for children with liver disease:

  • For liver cancer, we bring together pediatric hepatologists (what a liver specialist is called), transplant surgeons, and oncology experts for a weekly tumor board to determine the best individual, whole-child care—one that will provide children with the best outcome.
  • For children with metabolic dysfunction-associated fatty liver disease (MAFLD), we partner with our Pediatric Weight Control Program and/or our Adolescent Bariatric Surgery team, which can improve liver function in children and save children from progressing to cirrhosis.
  • To optimally treat glycogen storage disease, which is extremely rare, we bring together geneticists, dietitians, and hepatologists to offer innovative solutions in our pediatric hepatology center.
  • To expertly treat tumors in the liver, our pediatric hepatobiliary and transplant surgeons partner with Pediatric Oncology to allow some children the option of tumor removal (resection), which in certain cases may avoid the need for liver transplant.
  • For children with portal hypertension, our hepatologists join forces with interventional radiologists to explore ways to help lower the risk of bleeding, including minimally invasive solutions.
  • Sometimes, children need multiorgan transplants. Our renowned Stanford Children’s Pediatric Transplant Center specializes in all types of single and multiorgan transplants, including liver-heart, liver-kidney, liver-lung, and liver-intestine transplant. Stanford Children’s performs more pediatric multiorgan transplants than most centers in the nation.
  • Our care team in our liver care center includes doctors who specialize in the highly unique needs of children requiring liver-intestine transplant who are in intestinal failure, as well as those with inflammatory bowel disease, who may also need a liver transplant.
  • Our hospital’s teams have gained an international reputation for caring for children with Alagille syndrome who have very complex cardiac and liver needs and require highly tailored, specialized care.
  • We are one of a handful of hospitals in the country to conduct universal screenings for biliary atresia in infants at birth. The earliest possible diagnosis of biliary atresia leads to the best possible outcomes for these infants.
  • Our liver doctors partner with specialists in cystic fibrosis to provide holistic care for children with this condition, and they collaborate with heart doctors within Betty Irene Moore Children’s Heart Center to care for children with advanced heart disease.

Common symptoms of liver disease in children vary, but symptoms can include jaundice (yellow skin and eyes), abdominal pain, nausea, fatigue, dark urine, pale stools, itching, easy bruising, and swelling in the legs.

To diagnose pediatric liver disease, we rely on liver function tests for children, including blood tests to check liver enzymes, imaging tests (ultrasound, MRI, CT scan), liver biopsy, and other highly specialized tests, such as genetic testing and advanced endoscopy.

We are pleased to offer innovative diagnostics, some novel to us and others available at only a handful of larger centers, like ours, in the nation. The following are some examples:

  • Advanced endoscopy goes well beyond general endoscopy, and only a few children’s hospitals in the nation offer it. We perform rare minimally invasive procedures for complex disorders of the biliary system, rendezvous procedures that combine endoscopy with interventional radiology, and endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP).
  • We are fortunate and unique to have specially trained radiologists in liver disease who can track children’s liver masses with a cutting-edge contrast-enhanced ultrasound that does not require anesthesia.
  • We offer innovative, advanced MRI techniques to better categorize the health of your child’s liver, which helps us diagnose many liver problems, including liver tumors in children and acute liver failure in children.
  • To get a closer look, we safely perform liver biopsy for children via small incisions with interventional radiology, making it less invasive than traditional surgery.
  • We partner with experts in pathology who use multiple types of advanced technology to diagnose your child’s liver condition more precisely on a cellular level.