HYDERABAD: Osmania General Hospital (OGH) set an exceptional record by performing a liver transplant surgery on a Tyrosinemia patient for the first time, along with four other liver transplant surgeries in a month.
The five liver transplants included three cadaver and two live donor transplants which were conducted successfully. Out of the five patients, an infant was suffering from a rare genetic disease, Tyrosinemia type 1; other three patients were suffering from Wilsons’s disease, another genetic disease and one adult was suffering from Chronic Budd Chiari syndrome. All the patients belong to poor socioeconomic backgrounds.
Head of the Department of Surgical Gastroenterology, OGH, Prof Dr CH Madhusudhan told TNIE, “It is extremely rare for a government hospital to perform five liver transplants in a month. Usually, government hospitals perform one or two transplants, but we could achieve this feat. Every live transplant takes around 15-20 hours, whereas the cadaver transplant takes around 10 hours. Considering the complex and tedious nature of the surgery, this is a remarkable achievement for our department, also because we have been lacking medical infrastructure.”
It is important to note that the surgery which usually costs Rs 30 - Rs 40 lakh, was done free of cost under the Aarogyasri health scheme for all five patients. In addition, the hospital will also cover the lifelong expense of the immunosuppressant medicines, which cost around Rs 10,000 per month, at least for the first year post-surgery.