The Army Institute of Cardio-Thoracic Sciences (AICTS), Pune, a 600-bed superspecialty hospital of the Indian Armed Forces achieved a milestone when its first paediatric heart transplant was carried out on May 30.
Mohd Fardeen Mansoori, a 14-year-old son of an Army Veteran, first visited the hospital two years ago complaining of breathlessness and fatigue. The doctors and parents both suspected him to have been affected by some infection which would get cured in a week or two. Little did the parents realise that their child had a grave heart disease which had led to the dilatation of his heart and reduced its efficiency.
According to an official statement from the hospital, the child did not show any improvement and would have repeated admissions to the cardiac ICU with episodes of heart failure.
There was no therapy to cure the disease and seeing life slowly ebb away from this young boy, he was accepted for heart transplant about 18 months back and included in the list of recipients waiting for the same, a statement released by the hospital said.
“The challenge in this particular case was to find a heart which matched this young boy in weight, blood group and was within reasonable distance to enable safe retrieval and transplant. After a long wait of over a year, on May 30, the AICTS team received an alert for a probable heart donor, a 14-year-old girl, who had sustained head injury following an accident. She matched the waiting patient in weight and blood group. Coordination was carried out with Zonal Transplant Coordination Centre (ZTCC), Pune District for explanting the donor heart from Sahyadri Hospital, Pune,” stated statement from hospital.
{{/usCountry}}“The challenge in this particular case was to find a heart which matched this young boy in weight, blood group and was within reasonable distance to enable safe retrieval and transplant. After a long wait of over a year, on May 30, the AICTS team received an alert for a probable heart donor, a 14-year-old girl, who had sustained head injury following an accident. She matched the waiting patient in weight and blood group. Coordination was carried out with Zonal Transplant Coordination Centre (ZTCC), Pune District for explanting the donor heart from Sahyadri Hospital, Pune,” stated statement from hospital.
{{/usCountry}}The Corps of Military police of HQ Southern Command coordinated with Pune Traffic Police to establish a green corridor for seamless transport of the donor’s heart to AICTS in just 11 minutes.
“At AICTS the recipient was already in the operation theatre and the native heart was about to be removed from the patient’s body. Thereafter the whole team worked at a breakneck speed and the heart was transplanted in the mandated time frame,” stated the release.
AICTS authorities said, successful heart transplantation is a culmination of years of training, refining of techniques and smoothening of edges of well-rehearsed protocols.