Twenty years of liver transplants in India

NEW DELHI: Sanjay Kandasamy, 21, was born with a rare condition called biliary atresia, a disease where the bile produced in the liver damages it because the ducts taking it to the intestine are blocked.

To save his life, at 20 months of age, he had a part of his father’s liver transplanted in him in Delhi’s Apollo Hospital.

Twenty years ago, in November 1998, Kandasamy became the first person to undergo a liver transplant in India. He is now training to become a doctor himself.

“Today marks a special day for Indian medical sciences. It was over 20 years ago that India finally entered the hallowed club of countries that carried out liver transplants,” Dr Anupam Sibal, group medical director, Apollo Hospital, said .

The hospital has since carried out 3,200 liver transplants, including i n 302 children. “While India has come a long way since the first operation, there is still a huge gap to be filled. We have, over the years, endeavoured to create worldclass transplant centres,” Dr Preetha Reddy, vice-chairperson, Apollo Hospitals Group, said.

“Going f orward we will expand our services to unreached geographies and populations,” she said .

In India, nearly 20,000 people need a liver transplant at any given time. Although there has been an increasing trend since the first transplant, the National Organ and Tissue Transplantation Organization (NOTTO), the national regulator, puts the number of transplants in 2007 at 669, with the highest number of transplants in a year reported in 2015 at 804.

This number, however, does not include all hospitals in the country and the doctors estimate that about 1,800 liver transplants take place annually.