Naha: A kidney donor has died due to massive bleeding during a transplant operation, for the first time in Japan.
The 65-year-old female donor died during endoscopic surgery to remove a kidney for transplant to her son at the Doujin Hospital in Urasoe, Okinawa Prefecture, last Saturday, the Japan Society for Transplantation said on Thursday.
The kidney was successfully transplanted to the son, aged 43, the society said.
The hospital has reported the matter to police and to the transplant society and created a panel to look into what happened. The reasons for the woman`s death and for the bleeding are unknown.
On Wednesday, the society requested the hospital to set up a third-party investigative panel and announce the incident without delay.
It plans to send experts to the hospital to check if there were any problems with the surgery. In general, endoscopic surgery imposes less of a burden on patients than abdominal surgery.
Living-donor kidney transplants have gradually spread in Japan since the 1960s, with the total reaching around 20,000 including 1,276 carried out in 2010, the society said.
In 2003, a liver donor died following a transplant operation the previous year at the Kyoto University Hospital.
PTI
