Bhutan man's kidney transplantation in Kolkata

Doctors at a city hospital have performed a kidney transplant from a living donor, where the donor's vital organs are in an inverted position from normal anatomy. Both the recipient, a kidney failure patient, and the donor, her relative, are from Bhutan. While the donor has been released, the recipient is recovering and is expected to be released in a few days.

A dialysis-dependent patient came to RTIICS, where doctors recommended a kidney transplant. Doctors discovered that the donor had situs inversus totalis, a rare congenital condition characterized by mirror-image transposition of organs in the abdomen and chest.

"This is the first time we have obtained a donor with this rare congenital disease. The transplant went well and both the donor and the recipient are doing well," said the hospital's head of nephrology, Deepak Shankar Ray.

Experts said that situs inversus totalis affects one in 10,000 people, but unless that person has a congenital heart defect, they grow up normally. Most of them have no symptoms, so discovering the condition is mostly accidental.

In the case of donors with normal organ position, the practice is to remove the left kidney due to longer veins and arteries. In this case, the donor's right kidney was taken. The medical team included doctors Forqan B Shaikh, KS Bajoria, Amit Kundu and Ray.

"Most centers use living donor laparoscopic nephrectomy, but we used retroperitoneal laparoscopy, which has more advantages," said Shaikh, a consultant in general and robotic surgery.