Kasturba Hospital has successfully done a kidney transplant across blood groups, here.
A press release issued by the hospital on Saturday said that kidney transplant was generally done only if the receiver and the donor had the same blood group. Kidneys from donors with different blood group were considered incompatible with a high chance of it being rejected.
But the hospital, through a process called plasmapheresis, was able to transplant a kidney to a person with one blood group and the donor with another blood group on November 28.
A skilled medical and surgical team of doctors at the hospital performed the operation on a person, Krishna Devadiga, who had O positive blood group. His wife, Prema K. Devadiga, was keen to donate her kidney with motivation from daughter Chaithra, but had B positive blood group.
As there were no voluntary donors available, the transplant was done with the wife’s kidney. ABO incompatible (different blood group) transplantation was the only option for patients with no compatible donors.
Such a transplant was possible only after special treatment which cleaned blood group reactants or antibodies. This facility was available only in major cities and at a high cost.
The antibodies present in Mr. Devadiga were removed by plasmapheresis under the guidance of Shamee Shastri at the blood bank of Kasturba Hospital. The procedure was performed by a team of doctors that included Arun Chawla, Padmaraj Hegde, Joseph Thomas from Departments of Urology; Ravindra Prabhu, Shankar Prasad from Department of Nephrology; and Anita Shenoy, Amrut Rao and Vamshidhar from the Department of Anaesthesiology.
Explaining the role of transfusion medicine in patient management, Shamee Shastry, Head of the Department of Immunohematology and Blood Transfusion, said that monitoring of antibody levels was done daily prior to transplantation. To reduce the antibody titers to safe level, three procedures of therapeutic plasma exchange were done prior to the transplantation and two procedures were done post transplantation.
“Plasma exchange is a procedure used to remove the implicated antibody present in the plasma using an apheresis equipment. It is a new chapter in the history of kidney transplant for our hospital. The transplanted kidney is working well and the patient has recovered,” said M. Dayananda, hospital medical superintendent.
