Healthy with five kidneys! Bangladeshi patient undergoes third successful transplant

Chennai: After a rare and challenging surgical procedure, a chronic kidney disorder patient, who also suffers from heart ailments, now has five kidneys - a pair that he was born with and three transplanted ones.

The 41-year old patient, a Bangladeshi national, had undergone kidney transplants in 1994 and 2005, but both the kidneys ended up failing owing to uncontrolled hypertension. This left him dependent on dialysis.

While admitted at the Madras Medical Mission hospital in Chennai, the patient was also diagnosed with Coronary Artery Disease and underwent a triple bypass surgery nearly 3 months ago. It was on July 10 that Dr S Saravanan, Vascular and Transplant surgeon at MMM, performed the third kidney transplant surgery on the patient.

According to Dr Saravanan, the major challenges in the surgery were that the four existing kidneys (two natural and two transplanted) could not be removed owing to the risk of excessive bleeding. In case the kidneys were to be removed, the patient would have required a blood transfusion, which would have led to the production of antibodies and caused the rejection of the new kidney.

Additionally, there was the issue of placing the kidney in a body cavity that was already housing four kidneys.

“In case of kidney transplants, always the old kidneys are left behind in the body, as they shrink over time. But here, since there were four kidneys in his system, there was no space to place a fifth. Usually, the transplanted kidneys are placed behind the peritoneum, like the natural kidneys, but in this case, we had to create space for the fifth kidney,” Dr Saravanan explained to Zee Media.

He added that the kidney was placed high above in the abdominal cavity, right next to the intestine, as opposed to the conventional approach.

“The transperitoneal approach (through the gut), a surgery rarely performed even globally was what saved the day for my patient,” Dr Saravanan said.

The doctor emphasised that there was always a possibility of performing a third or fourth transplant after the failure of two transplants and that patients did not have to lose hope.

He added that following the procedure, the patient had been discharged, has gone through his first set of post-operation check-ups and continues to recover well.