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A team of doctors at Medanta—The Medicity Hospital in Gurugram performed a successful 3-way transplant swap or paired exchange, for a liver.
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This first-of-its-kind transplant swap involved three people from different states in India. They were all suffering from terminal liver failure and were in need of urgent liver donors.
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The Liver Transplant Team of the hospital decided to swap the livers of three patients whose families could not find a suitable match.
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The three transplants were performed simultaneously by operating on three donors and three recipients.
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A team of 55 doctors and nurses worked together in 6 operating rooms for over 12 hours to complete this task.
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Earlier in 2009, the doctor's team had performed 46 two-way swap surgeries, i.e., paired exchanges between two recipients and donors.
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Now they have expanded the concept to a three-way swap when the willing members of the family fail to find a suitable match.
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"This success will pave the way for increasing the living donor pool in the future with more such paired exchange transplants," says Drs. Rastogi, Bhangui, and Soin, who conducted the rare procedure.
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Dr. Naresh Trehan, chairman and managing director at Medanta, congratulated the team and said, "This historic achievement has been made possible by the close multidisciplinary effort of various senior super specialists and the strict treatment and operating protocols being practised at Medanta."
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The hospital now plans to expand the paid exchange programmes for liver and kidney transplantation and offer life-saving transplants to a larger population.
Source- Times of India