PUDUCHERRY: JIPMER is all set to introduce liver transplant facility by March next year, according to Dr S C Parija, JIPMER Director.
Inaugurating the CME programme on Obesity and Metabolic Surgery organized by the Department of Surgical Gastroenterology, he said that the facility would be another milestone in the health delivery system of the hospital. He said that renal transplant facility was already available in the hospital.
Dr Parija said, “JIPMER is committed to making latest methodologies and advanced medical facilities available to the poor, who could not otherwise afford them. We want the facilities for the poor and the have-nots,” he said adding that if a liver transplant was done in a private or a corporate hospital, the cost would be around Rs 25 lakh.
He said that several years of studies have shown that Indian bodies and genetics are different from their western counterparts. Indians suffer from abdominal obesity compared to people in the west whose bodies are uniformly obese. The Indian body composition puts them at high risk of diabetes and hypertension. He highlighted that JIPMER was one of the few major government institutes to launch a comprehensive obesity and metabolic surgery programme.
Dr Jaya Prakash Sahoo, Assistant Professor, Endocrinology, explained the metabolic problems and the role of medical management for obesity-related metabolic syndrome. Dr Sandeep Agarwal, Professor of Surgery at AIIMS explained the evaluation of a patient with morbid obesity for surgery and shared his experience of setting up an Obesity and Metabolic Surgery programme in an academic institution.