A 58-year-old doctor became the first coronavirus patient in Uttar Pradesh to receive plasma therapy as an experimental treatment for the disease at the King George Medical University (KGMU) here, a hospital official said on Monday.
According to doctors at the facility, the patient from Orai in Uttar Pradesh was administered 200 ml plasma on Sunday.
"It is for the first time that plasma therapy has been administered to a COVID-19 patient in any government hospital in Uttar Pradesh. Now we are anxiously waiting for the results," KGMU spokesperson Dr Sandeep Tiwari said on Monday.
His condition is being monitored, and if needed, he will be given a second dose later in the day or on Tuesday, the official said.
The patient, a doctor from Orai in Uttar Pradesh, was administered plasma donated by a doctor from Canada who was the first COVID-19 patient admitted to KGMU and later recovered, Dr Tulika Chandra of the hospital's Blood Transfusion Medicine Department said.
Three coronavirus patients who have now recovered have so far donated their plasma for the treatment of others suffering from the disease. They include a resident doctor of the KGMU, Tauseef Khan, she said.
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Convalescent Plasma Therapy is an experimental procedure for COVID-19 patients. In this treatment, plasma, a blood component, from a cured patient is transfused to a critically ill coronavirus patient.
The blood of a person who has recovered from COVID-19 develops antibodies to fight the virus. This therapy uses antibodies from the blood of a cured coronavirus patient to treat another critical patient.
The idea behind this therapy is that immunity can be transferred from a healthy person to a sick patient using convalescent plasma. Once the blood plasma of the recovered patient is infused with that of the second patient, the antibodies start fighting against coronavirus in the second person's body.
The process of donating plasma is similar to that of donating blood and takes about an hour.
On April 21, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had asked the state's medical authorities to promote plasma therapy for the treatment of COVID-19 patients after examining its efficacy.
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has recently allowed states to start clinical trials of plasma therapy. Many states like Kerala, Gujarat and Punjab have already started using it for treatment of coronavirus patients.
Several other countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States, have also started plasma therapy trials.
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