New Delhi:
A two-year old girl received kidney from her grandmother and liver from her father becoming the smallest child in the world to have successfully undergone dual live-donor transplant. The girl weighs just 7 kg.
Doctors who performed the operation at Aster Medcity told that it is mandatory that the weight of the child should be at least 10 kg for a transplant.
"There is evidence of successful dual transplant being done on a child weighing 9 kg. But till date, no one has performed transplant on a child weighing 7 kg," said Dr Mathew Jacob, consultant liver and abdominal multi-organ transplant surgeon, Aster Medcity.
However the decision of the transplant surgery was not immediate. "We wanted to wait till the child's weight touched 10 kg.
But when we realised that we would be risking her life if we waited, we discussed with the girl's family and decided to go for transplant," said Dr V Narayanan Unni, senior nephrologist, Aster Medcity.
Parvathy's mother Saritha MS told about their ordeal. She told that their daughter was four months old when she was put on daily peritioneal dialysis.
"The dialysis lasted for nearly 20 hours each day. After a year, she had to be put on ventilator and needed daily hemodialysis. But soon doctors said that transplant was the only option and they couldn't wait longer," said Saritha.
It was quite a problematic to find a donor of baby's size and age. It was then decided that the grandmother would donate her kidney. But trhen this also included complications as the adult kidney is nine and half to 11 cm, and that of a child is 4 cm.
Also almost half litres of blood flows in an adult kidney in an hour, while that amount of blood flows in a baby's whole body.
"The solution was to remove her damaged right kidney and place the new kidney. The blood volume in her kidney too had to be increased using highly specialised techniques," added Dr Jacob.
"Post-transplant surgery in November 2016, the child was in the hospital for 51 days. She has recovered well and now weighs 10.4 kg," said consultant paediatric intensivist Dr Rajappan Pillai.
Her grandmother, 53-yeear-old Sathi Raghavan "I told my son and daughter-in-law that I had to do this for my granddaughter. I am happy now as she able to move and breathe without much pain".
