Apollo Doctors perform Living Donor Liver Transplant and CABG, in one sitting spanning over 14 hours!

Apollo Hospital, Jubilee Hills, has accomplished a rare and complex feat of performing combined procedures of Living Donor Liver Transplantation and Coronary Artery Bypass Graft (CABG) operation, on a patient in a single sitting. The surgery spanning over fourteen hours, involved the expertise of multi-speciality teams including Cardiac, Oncology and Liver transplant.

The 67-year-old male patient from Hyderabad, Mr Siva Prasad Rao, was suffering from Liver Cirrhosis and Liver cancer. During evaluation for the liver transplant, he was found to have significant coronary artery disease with critical blocks in the blood vessels to the heart. The heart disease was found to be significant enough to preclude performing a liver transplant. Coronary stenting was not an option as, after stenting, the liver transplant could not be carried out for 8-12 weeks, and waiting was not an option as the patient’s liver cancer could spread during the waiting time. The multidisciplinary team at Apollo Hospitals decided to perform both the operation, Liver transplant and Coronary Artery Bypass at the same time.

The patient’s 33-year-old daughter, Mrs Rohini, came forward to donate a part of her liver. The operations were carried out on December 6^th, 2019. CABG was done first followed by Living donor liver transplant. The Living-donor liver transplant is a surgical procedure in which a portion of the liver from a healthy living person, in this case, the patient’s daughter was removed and transplanted in the patient. The entire operation took 14 hours to complete. The donor was discharged on 6^th Day after the operation and the patient was discharged on 12^th day after the operation. Both the patient and the donor are doing fine.

Meticulous planning, carefully timing the donor and recipient surgery and availing all concerned speciality services when needed, as the recipient had to undergo cardiac bypass surgery first and then followed by a liver transplant, ensured incident-free treatment, says Dr Manish C. Varma. This is the second of its type surgery done at Apollo Hospitals, four years ago we did a similar combination surgery on a small baby four years ago, which was the first of its kind in the world, than. The decision of the patient’s daughter to donate part of her liver is heroic, which really saved her father.