Hyderabad-based Yashoda Hospitals on Tuesday said its doctors had successfully performed a rare heart transplantation that occurs in very few cases involving mothers.
The transplant was performed on a 25-year old mother who has been suffering from a heart condition called 'Postpartum Cardiomyopathy', where the heart starts failing slowly. This rare condition starts during the pregnancy and after delivery stage. In this case, the patient has a 7-year old girl child.
The donor heart was secured from a 21-year old male who was declared brain dead after a motor vehicle accident. The operation was carried out by Yashoda's cardiologists Gopala Krishna Gokhale and Dr Rajasekhar on 15 December in Hyderabad.
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For Yashoda, this is the first-of-its-kind heart transplant and 8th overall heart transplant till date. In the pre-transplant exercise, Yashoda was supported by the Andhra Pradesh government's health initiative Jeevandhan (meaning organ donation) and the city Traffic Police.
In cases involving heart transplant, the donor's heart, mostly from brain-dead patients, has to be collected and harvested before transplanting it within 4-5 hours. Crucial to this is the movement of the organ in a carefully operated atmosphere from the donor's place to the hospital. The early it is executed the more is the success rate.
On average, a heart transplant costs Rs 10-20 lakh in India. The success rate stands at 80 per cent and the 5-year survival rate stood at 75-80 per cent.
