HYDERABAD: In what is being touted as a “rarest of rare” surgery, a team at Kamineni Hospital successfully performed a complex liver transplant on a 49-year-old patient who has end-stage liver disorder, without blood transfusion.
The team led by Dr Rajashekhar Perumalla, Hepatobiliary and Liver Transplant Specialist, transplanted a new liver into the patient with intraoperative blood loss of less than 500 ml, while not transfusing any new blood into the body.
The hospital notes this is a benchmark, difficult to surpass even globally. The patient, who hails from Chhattisgarh, has hepatocellular carcinoma, a cancer of the liver caused by liver cirrhosis or Hepatitis B or C infections. He had approached the hospital for a second opinion with complaints of weight and appetite loss. Examination of the patient at the hospital revealed a lesion in the right lobe of the liver.
“He was registered under the state government’s Jeevandan Programme for a liver transplant. The cadaver organ was eventually donated by the family of a 30-year-old male coal cutter from Singareni Collieries, who died of a road traffic accident,” informed officials.
“The team at Kamineni Hospitals completed the marathon surgery spread over eight hours, successfully. Restricting blood loss during surgery enables least compromise of the organ being operated upon, consequently, the postoperative complications are minimal and patient recovery is speedy,” said Dr Rajashekhar.
In fact, with his procedure, the patient’s postoperative recovery created another landmark with there being no need for ventilator support. Usually, liver transplant patients are kept on the ventilator for a minimum period of two days to a week.