First bowel transplant in Mumbai

After two years of a breakthrough bowel transplant surgery in Pune, Dr Gaurav Chaubal and his team of doctors performed Mumbai’s first small bowel transplant at Global Hospital. This is a complex and rare surgery, which has been conducted approximately 12-18 times in India, seven of them this same team. More than 50 per cent of these surgeries have been conducted in Maharashtra alone.
“The transplant brings relief to people who suffer bowel failures caused twing of the pathways, birth defects or scarring and death of bowel tissue,” said Dr Chaubal, who is Director, Liver, Pancreas, Intestinal Transplant programme and Hepato Pancreatico Biliary Surgery at Global Hospital, Parel, “Two years ago, we had done Pune’s first bowel transplant in a man at Jupiter hospital and he is doing just fine. The Mumbai patient has shown phenomenal progress post-surgery and has fully recovered. I urge people to come forward and donate organs for those who are in need.”
Anirban, the 46-year-old patient who had come from Kolkata, had severe abdominal pain in April 2022, which was diagnosed as Superior Mesenteric Artery Thrombosis. This led to bowel gangrene for which he was treated at a local hospital. He underwent resection anastomosis and jejunostomy on April 17, 2022. He was on parenteral nutrition since then and was led with the Zonal Transplant Coordination Committee (ZTCC) in May 2022. An alert was received on May 18 2022, and the team went for retrieval.
A small bowel transplant is considered for patients who develop complications from total parenteral nutrition (TPN), where a person has to be adminered nutrients via a drip into a vein because his/her bowel is unable to absorb nutrients from any food that is ingested. It is most often caused either a short bowel syndrome or a non-functioning bowel. Intestinal transplants are very complex and rare across the world and very few doctors have specialisation in such procedures. “Small bowel is a complex organ and transplants are prone to rejection. Since they are rare and complex, there is no waiting l of patients. The understanding of small bowel transplants is not as widespread in the medical fraternity too,” Dr Chaubal said.Best of Express PremiumPremiumPremiumPremiumPremium