Objective: To study the efficacy of model for end-stage liver disease (MEL D) in predicting short-term outcomes in patients undergoing liver transplantation (LT). Methods: The consecutive 62 patients who had received primary LT in our hospital from November 2000 to January 2005 were retrospectively analyzed. The pretransplantation MELD and Child-Turcotte-Pugh (CTP) scores of these patients were calculated. Concordance c-statistic was used to assess the efficacies of MELD and CTP scores in predicting the first posttransplantation 3-month survival rate. Results: Among the 62 patients receiving primary LT, 12 died during the first 3-month period and the posttransplantation 3-month survival rate was 80.65％. The 3-month survival rate predicted by using CTP score and MELD score was0.685 and 0.873, respectively. Unlike CTP calssification, MELD score indentified two subgroups of patients with CTP C with different overall survival (0.8824 vs 0.4545, χ2 = 7.00, P = 0.0081). Conclusion: Our present study shows that MELD score could offer more accurate prediction for short-term survival in patients who undergo primary LT than CTP score.