20 February 2009
By Vineeta Pandey
New Delhi, India
It was like a game of passing the parcel. Only, the parcel was a precious life–saver. Doctors at New Delhi’s Sir Ganga Ram Hospital performed a rare ‘Domino liver transplant’ on two children, believed to be the world’s youngest patients to undergo such an operation.
New Life: Twenty-two-month-old Shourya Verma (left) and Siya Thakur, 2, with their mothers at Sir Ganga Ram hospital in Delhi on Thursday
Shourya has been cured of maple syrup urine disease (MSUD) through the transplant that used 20% of his aunt’s liver, while his own liver was given to Siya, who was battling liver failure owing to a rare condition called Langerhans’s cell histiocytosis (LCH). Siya had many sessions of chemo–therapy to contain LCH, and though her disease went into remission her liver was irreversibly damaged, making transplant the only option.
Doctors at the hospital claimed that Shourya is India’s first and the world’s youngest recipient of a living donor liver transplant for MSUD, while Siya shares the same honour as the recipient of a domino liver transplant.
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