Hyderabad hospital performs rare liver transplant

A rare liver transplant surgery was carried out on a Bangladeshi boy, Swarnil Bhowmick, at the city-based Global Hospitals. A team of doctors comprising Global Hospitals' gastroenterologists K Ravindranath and Balbir Singh, led by Andreas A Prachalias, a liver transplant surgeon of King's College Hospital, London, performed the four-hour-long surgery at Global Hospitals on February 25.

"It is a very rare case," said Dr Andreas. "A rare cyst enveloped most of the three-year-old boy's liver and crippled him. Even when the three-year-old boy was hardly six months old, his mother Apu and father Biswadev Bhowmick, a government employee in Dhaka, noticed that the boy's abdomen grew in size but his growth was stunted. Though Dhaka doctors operated upon him when he is a year-and-half old, the cyst recurred and grew so large that it compressed the stomach, intestines and kidneys. The child could neither take normal food nor walk. Kolkata doctors, whom the parents consulted, recommended liver transplantation for the boy," said Andreas.

He said that Abu Bhowmick, who learnt about Global Hospitals' offer to undertake liver transplantation free of cost for children, travelled from Dhaka to Hyderabad with the child. "We felt that the cyst was perhaps resectable, but kept the liver transplantation option open," he said.

The doctors opened Swarnil's abdomen and found a multi-locational cyst that occupied the entire abdomen and eclipsed the liver's right lobe and a part of the left lobe. The doctors performed a "right extended hepatectomy" and removed liver's right lobe and a portion of the left lobe.

"The surgery left the boy with only 15 per cent of his original liver. Yet he coped so well and recovered so fast that he could be discharged after an eight-day stay in the hospital," Andreas said, adding, "even for King's College Hospital, which has so far done 2,500 liver transplants, it is a rare case because the cause of the cyst is still not known, and the chances of the cyst recurring are rare."