Chennai: India's leading private hospital chain Apollo hospitals successfully completed Asia's first en-bloc combined heart and liver transplant in Chennai. This complex procedure was performed on a 30-year-old man from Tiruchengode in Tamil Nadu who was suffering from a congenital condition where the failure of the right side of the heart causes liver failure.
While the patient waited since April for a suitable donor for the heart and liver transplant, the surgery was performed in October. Two teams – a heart transplant team and a liver transplant team – simultaneously worked together to perform this rare procedure.
The patient was discharged a week after surgery and is on the road to recovery, leading a normal life.
Speaking to CNN-IBN, Dr Paul Ramesh T, senior cardiothoracic & transplant consultant surgeon at Apollo Hospitals said, "What we have done here is Asia's first en block. Both the heart and the liver were transplanted when they were connected together as one single organ having open both chest and abdominal cavity at the same time. Some of the technical difficulties are in retrieving both the organs without damaging them and also in implanting them because as you can imagine they are still attached and the space between them is not that much. So when you try and stitch in the heart and the liver team is going to pull it down, it is going to tear parts of the heart or liver."
"You require extreme care and coordination. We had rehearsed this in a virtual way. We had established a chain of command if things went wrong. The reason we did this in one shot is that you reduce the amount of time that the organ spends outside the body and improves outcomes. These are sick patients, they tend to bleed a lot because they have liver failure, right side of heart may not work. We had to get this precise," he added.
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