The Medicity has conducted incompatible kidney transplant on the youngest child
New Delhi/Gurgaon: In a first in SAARC region, Medanta doctors have successfully conducted an ABO incompatible kidney transplant on a youngest girl child. The flawless surgery coupled with parent’s resolve to save their daughter gave Pratyasha, the three old Odisha girl on dialysis, a new lease of life.
She had a rare condition called ‘reflux nephropathy’ in which the urine tends to go back to the kidneys. This transplant, one of the most difficult ones, has now cured her of renal failure. But for this rare surgery, she would not have lived long through dialyses. Her mother’s love for her may be matchless but, oddly enough, her kidney did not match with Pratyasha’s. Thanks to advancement in transplant, she accepted her mother’s strange kidney as her own.
Doctors claimed the transplant to be the first-ever conducted on such a young patient in entire south Asia. The complexity of entire process could be gauged from the sum of money spent by her parents and the company in Gurgaon her father worked in. The cost of surgery is astronomical Rs 24 lakh!
Pratyasha was afflicted with Reflux Nephropathy from birth. When she was just a month old, she could not pass urine. Urine going back in kidneys later caused renal failure. The only solution left to save her life was kidney transplant. Firstly, blood group-compatible donors were searched for but of no avail. The hospital scouted for swap donor but that also did not materialise. Cadaveric donation was not available either. Her mother was the last resort, so doctors of the hospital had to go for blood group-incompatible transplant. The daughter was B+ while the mother was A+.
Usually, transplants are done only if a compatible donor is found. The biggest risk in incompatible transplant is the hyper-acute rejection, which can even lead to death. Doctors designed a special protocol to remove the antibodies, and then conducted the transplant.
Talking to Medicare News, Siddharth Sethi, Consultant, Pediatric Nephrology at Medanta said, ‘Dialysis on her was not the way out and it is not easy. The incompatible transplant was the last resort. The transplant on such a little girl is not easy either. Thankfully, no post surgery complications occurred which also speaks of dexterity of our team’
Prasun Ghosh, Associate Director – Renal Transplantation, at Medanta hospital, said that as Pratyasha weighed only 10 kg, it had put her to additional risk of rejection and also surgical complications due to smaller size of the child. Her abdomen was small, hence putting an adult-sized kidney into a small abdomen was technically challenging. There was also a high risk of clotting in blood vessels, when small vessels of the child are joined to the donor’s kidney.’
There is acute scarcity of cadaveric donation. About 2, 20,000 people in India are waiting for kidney transplant, out of which only 7,000 are able to receive transplants every year.
Talking to Medicare News, Pratyasha’s father said he had approached the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) also but even admission was a difficult task. ‘Our daughter needed immediate intervention.’
