Kidney transplant saves life of 6-year-old

NEW DELHI: The six-year-old girl, who lost both her kidneys after an infection and had been on dialysis since March at AIIMS, got a new lease of life on Friday. Doctors conducted a successful kidney transplant using the organ donated by a 58-year-old man from Karnal, Haryana, who had been declared brain-dead after suffering a cardiac arrest.

The donor’s liver has been used in another patient while his cornea and heart valves are preserved at the hospital, said officials.

“The six-year-old girl was admitted to the hospital for the past five months. She was undergoing dialysis twice a week. But after the transplant, she may finally be able to go home,” said a doctor.

A controversy had broken out when the girl’s family had alleged in June that one of her kidneys had gone missing post-surgery. Her father, who is from Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh, complained she was admitted to AIIMS for complications in her left kidney for which she underwent a surgery on March 14. But another kidney (the right one) had gone missing.

However, when a nine-member committee formed by the institute looked into the matter it found that the girl suffered from a “rare case of congenital fusion anomaly of bilateral kidneys,” which made it seem as if she had a “normal right kidney”. “But there was no separate right kidney,” the expert committee said.

Dr M C Misra, director of AIIMS, said that this year they have seen a significant increase in cadaver donations in the institute which is reflective of awareness among people about the issue. “This is the tenth donation of the year. Usually, we see two to three donations in a year,” he said.

Rajeev Maikhuri, transplant coordinator, said more than 100 staffers were involved in the process of retrieval and transplant.