First swap liver transplants performed successfully under TN CM Health Insurance Scheme

Innovative swap liver transplants, said to be the first such procedure to be initiated in Tamil Nadu under the Chief Ministers Health Insurance Scheme, were successfully performed at a private hospital here.

It was performed in April amid the raging COVID pandemic, MGM Healthcare, a super-specialty hospital here, said on Friday.

“This is the first swap procedure to be initiated in Tamil Nadu under the Chief Minister Health Insurance Scheme, at the hospital’s Institute of a liver transplant,” the hospital informed.

“A unique and secure transplant bio-bubble was implemented for the transplants and we successfully managed to vaccinate all our team members before that. All the staff, patients, donors and their family members underwent COVID RT-PCR tests and tested negative for COVID-19 at frequent intervals in both pre-and post-surgery phase.

Amid the pandemic, liver transplants are often hampered by limited availability of brain dead organ donors.

The alternative in medical science is harnessing the liver through the living donor liver transplantation in which a relative donates a part of his liver. In order to overcome this issue, the donor pool can be expanded by paired exchange liver transplant (swap liver transplant).

“We observed in transplant cases, close to 25 per cent of the donors get rejected due to various reasons and swap transplants can help us in saving many lives otherwise limited by the availability of compatible organs”.

Dr Karthik Mathivanan liver transplant surgeon, MGM Healthcare, said “it takes 10-12 hours for one transplant and a successful swap demands a large and well-experienced team including senior liver transplant surgeons, anesthetists, transplant critical care experts and technicians to coordinate and perform four surgeries simultaneously.”