Live organ transported from Bengaluru to Kolkata, first heart transplant conducted in east India

In what is claimed to be the first human-to-human heart transplant in eastern India, surgeons in a private hospital in Kolkata on Monday transplanted the heart of a 21-year-old man on a 39-year-old patient.

Representational image (Pic courtesy: pixabay.com)

Kolkata: History was created on Monday when a successful life-saving heart transplantation surgery was conducted on a 39-year-old male from Jharkhand after the organ of a brain dead was harvested and airlifted from Bengaluru to Kolkata. 

The patient's name is Dilchand Singh. The donor, whose family wants to be anonymous, was admitted at Sparsh hospital in Bengaluru in a critical condition after a road accident on May 16, 2018. The 21-year-old donor was declared brain dead on May 19 after suffering severe head injuries.

The doctors at Sparsh Hospital in Bengaluru got in touch with Fortis hospital in Chennai, who in turn got in touch with Fortis hospital in Kolkata and NOTO (National Organ Transplant Organisation) and found a matching recipient in Kolkata - Singh from Jharkhand. NOTO gave them the green signal, following which the heart was extracted from the donor and put in a jar. Then it was sent to Kolkata in a chartered flight, as per Zee Media.

The heart was brought to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose international airport by a special air ambulance at 10.53 am and left the airport at 11.09 am for Fortis hospital. A green corridor was put in place in coordination with Bidhan Nagar city police and finally, reached the hospital at 11.29 am. The entire journey from Bengaluru to Kolkata hospital was undertaken in three hours and nineteen minutes.

A team of 30 doctors team under veteran heart surgeon Dr Balakrishnan and Dr Tapas Raychaudhury conducted the transplant at Fortis Kolkata. The man from Jharkhand is reported to have been suffering from Dilated Cardiomyopathy and was on the waitlist since January 2017.

“First successful heart transplant was done in the state but the heart required had to be brought from another state which is a shame for West Bengal”, Dr Tapas later said. “About 35,000 hearts required for a state like West Bengal but the number of hearts available here is zero”, he added.   

"This operation is being performed for the first time in the eastern region. This is a very major operation, we cannot comment on the outcomes now," said Arafat Faisal, spokesman of the Fortis Hospital, IANS reported.

The immediate stability after the operation will be clear within 48 hours. But the immunological rejection process can appear gradually and constant monitoring is a need.

Mainly haemodynamic monitoring - mainly blood pressure, pulse rate pulmonary artery pressure, right ventricular pressure, urine output, the body temperature - needs to be monitored.