Continuing medical education on pancreas transplant inaugurated

CHANDIGARH: The first continuing medical education on Pancreatic transplant in India was inaugurated by Prof Vimal Bhandari on Saturday. Three of the simultaneous pancreas kidneys patients were also present during the inaugural function. Prof Bhandari who is the Director of National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation spoke on various aspects of organ donation and said that there is a severe discrepancy between the demand of organs and the supply.More than 200000 people in India are in need of organ replacement therapy and only about 10000 of these are able to undergo organ replacement surgery. Most of these transplants occur from living donors. However, in the recent years, the organ donation rate from deceased donors has been increasing due to the efforts of Government of India. One of the initiatives taken by the government has been creation of national, regional and state level organisations to promote organ donation.
The meeting has been organised by the Department of Renal Transplant Surgery to raise awareness regarding pancreas transplantation in the country. About 70 delegates from overseas and all across the country registered for the meeting. Prof Bhansali told the gathering that the incidence of Type I Diabetes is increasing in India over the last few years and these patients are affected at an early age and require multiple injections of insulin as well as 5-7 needle pricks for measurements of their blood glucose which is not possible for majority of their patients. He informed that at PGI currently more than 1000 patients of Type I Diabetes patients are registered but many patients find it very difficult to control their blood sugars even with the multiple injections of insulin.
Dr Gagan Priya delivered a talk on the use of newer ways of managing Type I diabetes like insulin pumps and said it has become lot easier to manage these patients with these pumps. However even with these pumps only about 25% of patients are able to achieve ideal blood sugar control. Dr Sanjay Sinha who has travelled all the way from Oxford explained about the different techniques of doing pancreas transplantation. He also told that with the current techniques results of pancreas transplantation have become very good and one can expect more than 95% survival rates after at 1 year. He also said pancreas transplant is the best form of treatment at this time for patients with Type I Diabetes with end stage renal disease. Dr Raman Dhanda, clinical director of pancreas transplant from Manchester UK shared his experience of the ways to reduce complications associated with pancreatic transplantation. In his own experience, he could reduce the complication rate after pancreatic transplantation from a high of 30% to less than 4% at his hospital at Manchester. Dr Jamal Rizvi from Ahmedabad explained that survival was best when these organs were transplanted at the same time as compared to transplanting the two organs at different times.