The Pandemic Did Not Stop Us From Saving Lives
  • 120 Liver Transplants During Covid with 94% Success
  • 3 successful multi organ transplants
  • 10 successful paediatric liver transplants

VPS Lakeshore Hospital Kochi completes 120 liver transplants despite the challenges of the Covid period since March 2020. The hospital’s Comprehensive Liver Care Institute team has attained this with a success rate of 94%. Among the 120 transplants, 10 successful paediatric liver transplants and 3 multi-organ transplants have been performed by the CLCI team. While the challenges put forth by the pandemic have no precedents, the CLCI team delivered the best outcomes to this large number of patients, in which the youngest patient was a six months old baby and the oldest being 74, leaping myriad hurdles of COVID-19.

15 post Covid patients

One of the challenging parts of the pandemic time was to perform liver transplants in patients who were recovered from covid-19. But the CLCI team tackled this challenge with its expert team of specialists and focused care. The team performed successful transplantation in 15 post-Covid patients, six donors who had recovered from Covid infection also safely underwent the transplant surgery.

“Transplantation in patients who have recently recovered from COVID‐19 is indeed a challenge with myriad uncertainties including the diagnosis, underlying post covid complications, multi‐organ systemic involvement, and the possibilities of immunosuppression”, said Dr Navneetan Subramaniam chief of liver anaesthesia and critical care, VPS Lakeshore Hospital. “And the uncertainty continues on the safety of performing such a complex surgery in a recipient who has recently recovered from Covid-19. But our team handled this effectively and all the recipients are in good health now”, he added.

Minimal Post Transplant Complications

“In the success of a liver transplant, post-transplant care is very crucial”, said Dr. Abhishek Yadav, Director of Comprehensive Liver Care Institute, VPS Lakeshore. “Our expert team ensures the patient’s strict adherence to a specially formulated care plan and thus we were able to minimize post-transplant complications. In fact, even immediately after the surgery, post-transplant ventilation was not needed in 60% of patients and Biliary complications were seen only in 6% of patients. Minimal post-transplant complications contributed to the high success rate and lower costs of treatment. Liver transplantation at VPS Lakeshore is performed at only a fraction of cost as compared to other centers worldwide”, Dr Abhishek Yadav added.

Zero Donor Complications

While maintaining such a significant success rate, the CLCI team also ensured no donor faced post-surgery complications. There were donors who were aged over 50 and those who have recovered from covid-19 and all of them are back to their normal life. The team ensured the quick recovery of the donors and they were discharged early reducing the long hospital stay with focused care.

“There are many misconceptions and fear of complications that can occur during the surgery that prevent people from donating organs. But CLCI has proven that donors can lead a normal life without any complications. All our donors are perfectly healthy”, said Dr. Abhishek Yadav. 120 of our life saving donors are living a normal healthy life now.

Living Donor Liver Transplants

In contrast to global statistics where the majority of liver transplants are Cadaveric, 90% of transplants our team performed are living donor transplants, which is a far more technically challenging surgery. Living donor transplants reduce the long waiting of patients, which may result in losing their lives, and is indeed a life-saving reality.

The CLCI team comes with experience in performing more than 1500 Liver transplants maintaining the aforementioned success rate so far. The hospital stands among the best multi-organ transplant centres in the country and has performed the first ever living donor liver transplantation in Kerala in 2005

Dr Abhishek Yadav

Liver Transplantation Beating The Covid Pandemic

MBBS; M.S(General Surgery), M.Ch. (Surgical Gastroenterology), FACS, Fellowship in HPB Surgery and Liver Transplantation
Director-Comprehensive Liver Care Institute

Dr Abhishek Yadav comes with an experience of more than 15 years in HPB Surgery and Liver Transplantation. Having expertise in living donor, split liver, paediatric, and cadaver liver transplantation, he has performed many complex and rare liver surgeries and pioneered many innovations in the field of liver surgery and transplantation while maintaining highest success rate in liver transplantation in the country. He was also instrumental in setting up liver transplant programs in many centres across the country and internationally. He was the University topper at Gujarat University in 2016 in General surgery for which he was awarded 3 gold medals.

Reference: https://www.thehindu.com/brandhub/matching-global-standards-in-liver-transplantation-beating-the-covid-pandemic/article65760885.ece


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