LUCKNOW: In a landmark development that may cut the wait list for patients in need of kidney transplant, doctors at Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences conducted the state’s first swap renal transplant on Tuesday after two families agreed to the respective spouses donating a kidney to the other patient in exchange.
The beneficiaries were 53-year-old Chitra from Azamgarh and 47-year-old Rohan of Lucknow, both patients of end stage renal disease (ESRD) in which transplant is the only hope. Chitra and old Rohan had been waiting for a donor.
“In both cases, the spouses were willing to donate a kidney, but during tests the required matching was not achieved,” said Prof Narayan Prasad, head of nephrology department. The teams of nephrology and urology departments then zeroed in on swap renal transplantation.
A new round of crossmatch tests with swapped donors — Rohan’s wife Aarti for Chitra and Chitra’s husband Ashok for Rohan — was launched and the desired parameters were found to be in sync.
The option was explained to both couples along with the risk and benefits. Once their consent was achieved, the formalities of permissions under the Tissue and Human Organ Transplantation Act, amendment and rule of 2014 were initiated.
Thereafter, clearance from anesthesia department team led by Prof Anil Agarwal, and including Prof Sanjay Dhiraj, Dr Divya Srivastava and Dr Rafat Shamim, was obtained and the procedure conducted on August 31.
“Two teams comprising surgeons from the urology department, supported by anesthetists and para medical staff, were readied for simultaneous procedures. The extraction from donors and transplantation took nearly four hours. The patients were kept in post-operative ICU. When they were declared fine, we could break the good news,” said surgeon and head of urology department Prof Aneesh Srivastava, who was assisted by Dr MS Ansari, Dr Uday Pratap Singh and Dr Sanjay Sureka.
SGPGI director Prof RK Dhiman said, “This beginning will make it easy for patients in need of transplant who lead a traumatic life waiting for a match. Some unfortunate ones even die in the wait. The swap transplant option will widen the pool of donors and eventually help in cutting the waiting list.”
(Names of the patients have been changed on request)
