Liver transplant on youngest, lightest patient successful in Vietnam
Success for first Vietnamese dual liver transplant operation

Doctors at the Padiatrics Hospital No.2 perform a liver transplant for a child with donored liver taken from his grandfather. Photo courtesy of the Padiatrics Hospital No.2

The premature boy was born in February last year with congenital biliary atresia, a rare condition in newborn infants in which the bile ducts outside the liver are abnormal and are damaged by progressive inflammatory process.

His mother, 32, gave birth to the child three months early.

Symptoms such as yellowish skin and eyes started to occur when the boy was a month old. He was diagnosed with congenital biliary atresia and underwent the Kasai procedure, the first treatment for biliary atresia.

The Kasai procedure is performed to reconstruct the bile ducts and restore bile flow. However, it may slow liver damage and delay or prevent complications.

The boy was back in hospital in June and was diagnosed with serious pneumonia and end-stage liver failure.

Doctors said a liver transplant was the only cure.

On June 18, doctors performed a 15-hour live-saving operation with medical assistance of experts from Belgium.

The child received a portion of a healthy liver taken from his 56-year-old grandfather as his father has fatty liver disease and he was not a suitable donor.

Two months after the operation the boy has recovered well, gaining weight and sitting on his own.

The liver donor is also in a stable condition.

It is the 13th liver transplant carried out at the hospital.

Professor Tran Dong A, an expert in organ transplant, who joined the operation as an advisor, said it was one of the two most serious cases the hospital had ever had.

He said the child would have died if the transplant wasn’t carried out.

As organs taken from living donors are rare, the hospital has performed organ transplants from brain-dead donors to save more children in need of organ transplant, according to Dr. Pham Ngoc Thach, deputy director of the hospital.

Lung transplant

Hanoi's Viet Nam-Germany Hospital has successfully conducted a transplant of two lungs from a brain-dead donor.

Professor Tran Binh Giang, the hospital's director, said on Monday that this was the second time a transplant of this kind has been performed in Vietnam, after the first successful operation in December last year.

The recipient was a 38-year-old man from Hanoi who suffered from bronchiectasis. He was diagnosed with the disease when he was young and the illness had grown more serious over the past decade, leaving him reliant on a breathing machine.

The donor was a young person with in-tact organs.

The transplant was conducted over the course of nearly 15 hours from 4pm on August 12 until 6.30am the next day.

The transplant of two lungs from dead-brained donor is considered to be one of the most complicated organ transplant techniques.

Six hours after the surgery, the patient’s lungs were working well. The patient is expected to be able to breathe by himself in the coming few days.

During nearly one week from August 12 to 18, the Viet Nam-Germany Hospital successfully conducted 15 organ transplants from both alive and brain-dead donors.

Eight months ago, the first transplant of two lungs from a brain-dead donor was conducted on a 17-year-old patient. The patient’s lungs have so far performed well.

The donor was a man from northern Ninh Binh Province. His donated organs saved five patients.

The transplants of his heart, liver and kidneys were conducted on four other patients at the Viet Nam-Germany Hospital with the participation of nearly 300 medical staff.

All five patients are recovering.

Since 2009, there have been 57 brain-dead organ donors in Vietnam. The Viet Nam-Germany Hospital conducted 25 heart transplants, two lung transplants, 54 liver transplants and 99 kidney transplants during this period.

VNS