In a complex surgery, doctors at Apollo Hospital Chennai has transplanted the heart and liver of a brain dead donor to Ponnar, a 30 year old. Ponnar was suffering from breathlessness and bouts of jaundice for the last eight years.
What makes this surgery significant is that the doctors transplanted the organs together, with both of them connected to each other.
Ponnar, who hails from Tiruchengode in Namakkal district, was brought to Apollo Hospitals March with symptoms of liver and heart failure caused by high pressure in a vein connecting the heart to the liver. It took six months to find an appropriate donor liver-heart match.
Ponnar waited from April 2015 to October 2015 till a suitable donor was found. He underwent the combined heart and liver transplant on October 14 and was discharged within a week after the surgery.
An exceptional student who completed his masters in engineering and a gold medallist, Ponnar, at 22 years of age, started noticing swelling in his abdomen, shortness of breath and found that he was turning yellow.
This was diagnosed as cirrhosis of the liver, leading to liver failure. He was advised a liver transplant, which his family was ready to get done for the young man. "However, when he presented himself for liver transplant, it was discovered that Ponnar had a congenital condition called Ebstein's anomaly - a failure of the right side of the heart to develop properly, which was the cause of the liver failure," said Dr Paul Ramesh, consultant cardiothoracic surgeon, Apollo Hospitals.
This left Ponnar with just one option - a combined heart and liver transplant. The procedure involved surgery of the thoracic cavity (for the heart) as well as the abdominal cavity (for the liver), making it a highly risky.
"With the heart not functioning in an efficient manner, there was high pressure on the liver, causing destruction of the liver cells leading to jaundice and cirrhosis," said Dr Ramesh.
Separate body transplants are also risky as toxins would accumulate in liver, which, in turn would attack the heart. But in this case, the transplant team had to take into consideration the risk of excessive bleeding because of simultaneous transplant.
View Latest News