A rare lung transplant, the third of its kind in the country, was performed at a Secunderabad-based hospital near here.

Doctors at Yashodha Hospital successfully operated upon the lungs of a 34-year-old woman from Pune, who was suffering from interstitial fibrosis, a critical condition where lungs become stiff, blocking passage of oxygen into blood.

The hospital’s team comprising chief cardiothoracic transplant and minimal access surgeon AGK Gokhale and senior consultant anesthetist Subramanyam performed the 14-hour long surgery.

Doctors treating her in Mumbai had suggested a lung transplant, as both her lungs were damaged.

The decision to conduct a surgery was taken after family members of the brain-dead patient, who had been bed ridden for several months and was dependent on external supply of oxygen, agreed to donate the organ.

The patient has been doing well since the transplant, though she will be under observation for another three to six months.

source: http://www.Business-Standard.com / Home> General News / Press Trust of India / Hyderabad, September 21st, 2012

Dr. Sangwan examines the eyes of another returning patient, Praveen Reddy. After losing sight in a chemical accident at his workplace, Reddy was successfully treated with the stem cells. But years later, he developed a few complications. (Photo: Rhitu Chatterjee)

Ashok Chakravarti remembers the moment he went blind.

It was on February 18, 2002. He was at work, at a chemical plant, when a pipe carrying sodium hydroxide (caustic soda) started to leak.

“I was fixing the leak when the chemical splashed into my eyes,” he says. The accident damaged the outermost layer of his eyes, the cornea.

Chakravarti is among thousands of Indians who lose their sight in chemical accidents each year.

Today, some of those people can see again, thanks to scientists at the L.V. Prasad Eye Institute, in Hyderabad.

The institute is treating patients with stem cells – not the controversial embryonic stem cells, but adult stem cells.

Inside the lab where the cells are grown, Savitri Maddileti shows me two petri dishes. Each dish contains a tiny piece of eye tissue from a patient.

“One is [from a] 15-year-old female, and the other is [from a] five-year-old male,” she says.

Both children had accidents with household chemicals and became blind in one eye.

What scientists here aim to do is fix the damaged eye with stem cells taken from the good eye. (In patients who have suffered damage to both eyes, the stem cells are taken from the eye of a close relative.)

Maddileti and her team don’t isolate the stem cells from the eye tissue, but under the right conditions, those cells start growing on their own.

“Can you see these bright cells coming out?” she says, showing me an image through a microscope.

The cells look shiny, and they are starting to form a thin transparent layer. This is the new corneal tissue that will be transplanted into the patient’s damaged eye.

Pathologist Geeta Vemuganti, who heads the team that grows these stem cells, says the process is much like gardening.

“It’s akin to putting seeds, or a little sapling along with a little bit of soil, or the roots,” she says – the stem cells being the seeds or saplings, and the rest of the eye tissue being the soil or roots.

Vemuganti’s team is not the first to repair damaged corneas with stem cells. This technique was developed by a group of Italian scientists.

But Vemuganti modified that technique, making it simpler and faster.

“Instead of three to four weeks, we made it 10 days,” she says.

This also made the process less expensive, which is important in a hospital that treats all patients, including those who can’t afford to pay.

Vemuganti and her colleagues have treated hundreds of patients from all over India.

One of them is Ashok Chakravarti, the man who lost his sight back in 2002 while fixing a pipe at work. Three months and a few surgeries later, he was able to see again.

“It was like being given a second life,” he says.

But after several years of normal vision, Chakravarti started having eye problems again. So he has returned to the institute to see Virender Sangwan, the surgeon who spearheaded the stem cell initiative.

Sangwan examines Chakravarti’s eyes.

“Your body has rejected the right cornea,” Sangwan tells Chakravarti.

That’s because Chakravarti wasn’t just given the stem cell transplant; he also received corneal tissue from a dead donor, because his injury was especially severe.

Sangwan says the stem cell transplant worked just fine, but the corneal graft is starting to fail.

“That’s a normal graft rejection, like any other transplant rejection,” says Sangwan. “So we are going to replace that cornea and see if that will work.”

Many of his patients return with post-surgical complications. Treating them is an ongoing process.

But Sangwan says any success is important because when poor people in India go blind, they lose more than their sight.

“Once you don’t have the eyesight, then the society doesn’t respect you,” he says. “Socially [you’re] not productive, so everybody starts neglecting [you].”

By restoring sight, Sangwan says he is restoring his patients’ self esteem and, as he puts it, their “faith in life.”

source: http://www.theworld.org / Home> Health / by Rhitu Chatterjee / May 30th, 2012

Hyderabad:

A carpenter’s long toe has begun functioning as a thumb after doctors at a city-based private hospital performed a rare transplant to replace the  missing vital digit.

Shyamsundar, 26, a carpenter from Karimnagar district, lost the thumb on his right hand last year in September while working on a wood-cutting machine in Dubai. The initial treatment was done by doctors at a Dubaihospital who amputated the critically-damaged thumb and advised Shyamsundar to go in for the thumb reconstruction surgery that would restore mobility to his hand.

Shyamsundar, however, decided to fly back to India instead whereupon he approached Secunderabad’s Yashoda Hospital where a six-hour surgery was performed on him by a team of doctors on November 4.

“After the accident, I could not grip anything with my right hand. I thought it had put an end to my career. But, after the surgery, I am able to write, eat and hold things,” Shyamsundar said at a news conference on Saturday. And, although his foot – missing a toe following the transplant – might ache, he said that the thumb was more important to him. Shyamsundar is now set to return to Dubai, where he has been working for the last four years, given that he has regained much of the use of his right hand. “I will request the company to place me in the administrative wing until I recover completely,” he said. Surgeons said that while losing a toe has little effect on a person’s ability to walk or run, loss of a thumb nearly incapacitates hand functionality. Doctors said that Shyamsundar will regain full use of his hand in about three months. “This new thumb now has movement and will have sensation and nail growth in a few weeks,” said Dr K Murali Mohan Reddy, the hand and reconstructive micro-surgeon who led the surgery.

“About six weeks after the surgery, Shyamsundar gained functional recovery,” said Dr Reddy who performed the operation along with plastic surgeon Dr T Shashikanth. He added that although such injuries were common among carpenters and workers at hardware factories, few were aware of this reconstructive surgery.

This procedure was first performed at Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences ( Nims) in 1990. However, due to poor awareness, such surgeries are rarely performed.

source: http://www.TimesofIndia.Indiatimes.com / Home> City> Hyderabad / TNN / March 18th, 2012