Kamineni Hospitals creates history with a zero blood transfusion liver transplant, limits blood loss!

Kamineni Hospitals successfully performed a complex liver transplant on a 49 years old Businessman from Durg, Chhattisgarh. The terminal liver disease patient was suffering from hepatocellular carcinoma, a cancer of the liver caused by liver cirrhosis or Hepatitis ‘B’ or ‘C’ infections. The acclaimed liver transplant team at the hospital led by Dr Rajashekar Perumalla, Hepato biliary and Liver Transplant Specialist; accomplished a rare international milestone. They performed the highly demanding transplant with intraoperative blood loss of less than 500 ml, while not transfusing any blood, a benchmark difficult to surpass even for global Centres of excellence. The patient has since recovered and is set for discharge.  

The patient approached Kamineni Hospitals for a second opinion with complaints of weight and appetite loss, after consulting specialists at two leading hospitals in Chennai and Hyderabad. He is a known patient of Hepatitis ‘B’ related chronic liver disease, suffering from liver cirrhosis with portal Hypertension for almost two years and is currently on medical treatment. Examination of the patient at the Hospital revealed a solitary lesion in the right lobe of liver and the strong suspicion of he being inflicted of hepatocellular carcinoma was confirmed. The Liver Transplant team considered him an apt case for Liver transplant. As there was no scope for a living related donor liver transplantation, with none of the relatives being from his blood group of ‘O’ Positive, he was registered under the state government’s Jeevandan Program and had to wait for a month to find a suitable cadaver liver. In the meantime he was administered Transarterial Chemoembolisation, by which medication was delivered directly to the tumour portion of the liver, to prevent its further progress. The cadaver organ was donated by the family of a 30 year old male coal cutter from Singareni Collieries, who died of a road traffic accident.

The patient underwent Deceased Donor Liver Transplanton July 14^th, 2021. The team at Kamineni Hospitals with exceptional success rate in Liver transplantation, completed the marathon surgery spread over 8 hours, successfully. It was a breakthrough procedure in medical annals, considering there being no need for blood transfusion and further limiting the intraoperative blood loss to less than 500ml. Restricting blood loss during surgery enables least compromise of the organ being operated upon, consequently the post-operative complications are minimal and patient recovery is speedy.The team ensured his lactate level being maintained below 3.5 and there was no reperfusion injury. The patient’s post-operative recovery created another landmark with there being no need for ventilator support, normally Liver transplant patients are on ventilator for a minimum period of two days to a week.The ground-breaking surgery was performed by the adept Liver Transplant team of Dr.Rajashekar Perumalla, Hepato biliary and Liver Transplant Specialist; Dr Kishan Nunsavata, Medical Gastroenterologist; Dr Biswaroop Pal, Liver Transplant ICU Specialist and Dr Satyanayana, Surgical Gastroenterologist.