JAPAN PERFORMS LIVING DONOR LUNG TRANSPLANT

Patient’s husband and son donate part of their lungs to replace her severely damaged lungs due to Covid-19 infection

JAPAN has performed the world’s first living donor lung transplant on a patient, who lost functionality of both her lungs due to Covid19 infection.

The operation, which was carried out in Kyoto University Hospital, took around 11 hours during which doctors transplanted part of healthy lungs from the patient’s husband and son to replace her severely damaged lungs.

The woman was admitted to the hospital on Monday and was connected to an artificial heartlung device before she underwent a transplant to receive part of her husband’s left lung and part of her son’s right lung two days later.

Both donors are in stable condition. The patient, who is currently in intensive care, is expected to be discharged in two months if all goes well, the hospital said.

Kyodo News reports that according to the hospital, while dozens of lung transplants to treat damage after Covid-19 infection have been performed in China, the US and Europe using organs from brain-dead donors, this is the first living donor transplant.

It said that the waiting period for patients to receive a transplant can be as long as 2½ years in Japan, where there are few such donors.

In this case, the patient’s husband and son have donated part of their lungs after it was determined that the woman had no hope of recovery and only a lung transplant could save her life.

The surgery went ahead after both acknowledged the risk of decreased lung capacity on their part.

Such transplant operations usually have restrictions on who can undergo such surgeries based on age and physical condition.

Professor Hiroshi Date, the thoracic surgeon who led the surgery, said it had created a new option for patients and there is now much hope for those in a similar situation.

The woman, who is from western Japan, had no pre-existing medical conditions but her respiratory function deteriorated rapidly after she was infected with the coronavirus at the end of last year.

She developed pneumonia that caused both her lungs to harden and shrink, destroying most of their functionality.

The hospital had also deemed that the infection risk to medical staff had sufficiently decreased after at least two months had passed since she received a negative result in a polymerase chain reaction test.