A retired Central government employee aged 68 from Bengaluru, who was diagnosed with end-stage lung disease and severe coronary artery disease, got a new life as he underwent heart-lung transplant on January 2.
Thanks to the generosity of the family members of a 24-year-old road accident victim, who was declared brain dead at Sparsh Hospital in Yeshwantpur, the senior citizen Kasim Shariff is now able to lead a normal life.
Mr. Shariff was first diagnosed with age-related lung disease in 2016 in a city hospital and he was on routine treatment. However, his condition eventually deteriorated and he was diagnosed with end-stage lung disease for which lung transplant was the only solution.
Doctors at Narayana Health (NH) had also diagnosed him with severe coronary artery disease. As his health condition was not suitable for bypass surgery, the patient was registered at Jeevasaarthakathe, the State’s nodal agency that facilitates cadaver organ donations, in November 2018 for heart and lungs.
Julius Punnen, senior consultant cardiothoracic and transplant surgeon at NH, said the surgery was complicated compared to a single organ transplant as heart and lungs function in tandem to supply and deliver oxygen to the rest of the body. “This is the first such surgery in Karnataka,” he claimed.
Six-hour surgery
For this transplant, organs were retrieved as a bloc and transplanted in the recipient’s body. The surgery that went on for more than six hours is successful and the patient is responding to treatment, he said.
With help from the Bengaluru traffic police, who created a green corridor to transport the organs within 40 minutes of retrieval from Yeshwantpur to NH in Bommasandra, covering 62 km, the doctors were able to transplant the organs in time.
“Lung transplant is complicated, risky and the chances of infections are higher. In this case, we were doing bloc transplant that made the surgery more complex. The patient will be under observation for the next few days to avoid complications,” said Basha Khan, senior consultant (pulmonology).