Successful kidney transplantation performed in COVID-19 survivors

Five patients who had recently recovered from COVID-19 underwent successful kidney transplantation at Kochi’s VPS Lakeshore Hospital. All the patients are doing well, a A news release issued by the hospital said,

Since the pandemic struck the country, organ transplantation surgeries were postponed due to increased risks. Performing it in patients who just recovered from the viral infection was even rarer. Considering the life-threatening situation of patients, after a thorough and complete evaluation, Lakeshore Hospital went ahead and successfully performed kidney transplantation in the patients who recently recovered from COVID-19.

There was almost complete lack of data regarding the safety of transplantation, in a patient recently recovered from Covid 19. It was also not clear how long the corona virus will survive in the body after the patient recovers from the illness and whether immunosuppressive medications might flare up the disease. Thus, the surgeries were performed after waiting for a minimum period of 12 weeks after their recovery from Covid 19. “All the patients were tested negative for the virus thrice by RT PCR and all the relevant investigations were done to ensure that they were completely fit and we also transplanted kidneys from 4 donors who had recent COVID-19infection and recovered from it after a minimum period of 4 weeks”, said Dr. Abi Abraham, Director of Nephrology, VPS Lakeshore Hospital.

Dr. Abi Abraham, Director of Nephrology, Dr. Jithin. S. Kumar, Dr. Karthik Ganesh, Dr. Sunitha Simon from Nephrology and Dr. George P Abraham, Chief Renal Transplant Surgeon and Dr Datson George from Urology were part of the transplant team.

The release said the current pandemic of COVID-19 totally disrupted the kidney transplants in the country. When the lockdown was announced all the major transplant centres in the country stopped doing transplants which actually caused a lot of difficulty to most patients waiting for transplantation.