The Christian Medical College (CMC) has added a new feather to its cap. The institution will now be a part of a national body to frame plans and policies for liver care in the country.
“This is a big landmark for this century-old institution, which has also crossed the 50 liver transplants milestone in the past 14 years,” said medical superintendent of the CMC hospital, Dr Eapen. He said the liver transplant programme was started here in 1991, five years after the country had made organ donations legal through enacting an Act.
While in the Western countries where liver transplantation is taking place for the past 40 years, CMC is able to achieve 85 per cent survival rate at the end of one year post surgery, on par with many of these countries.Unlike other healthcare institutions in the country, CMC is focusing on cadaver transplant and in very few cases, donations between mother and children. The hospital is not encouraging adult to adult live donations (as one in 300 persons, who had donated liver, faced the risk of death according to studies) and only children above five years were being considered for transplant.
In the past two years, there had been a surge as 14 transplants were done including the 51st one, which was performed only last week. “The first patient who underwent liver transplant surgery at CMC is a Bengali man who is around 40 years at present and is doing fine, after 14 years of transplantation. Without transplantation he would have died,” Eapen added.
His colleague Dr Jayamani Ramachandran, head, department of Hepatology, said so far six donations from parents to children had taken place.
“We are happy to thank the community for the organ donations (harvested from brain dead persons) and we are returning something to the society by way of performing free transplantation to the poor and the needy,” Eapen said.
Lack of country-based data on liver diseases, unknown waiting time for patients for liver donations, unavailability of liver on time and cost of surgery are still major constraints in this direction. “We are working out strategies to make this surgery cost-effective and affordable. As of now, the surgery cost at CMC is the cheapest in the range of around 15 lakhs, Eapen noted.
CMC has also started a postgraduate course DM in Hepatology recently, to improve the number of liver specialists in the country.
