Pancreas transplant gives hope for diabetics

KOCHI: He is a world-renowned pancreas transplant surgeon having performed over 1,000 such surgeries in the US and UK. However, Dr Anil Vaidya, who has now joined the Apollo Hospitals Chennai after his stints with University of Miami and University of Oxford, is surprised by the fact that pancreas transplantation is yet to catch up in India, the diabetic capital of the world.

“While nearly 20,000 pancreas transplants have taken place across the world, mainly in the US and Europe, it is quite surprising that hardly seven transplants have taken place in India, four of them recently at Apollo. This is really surprising given another fact that the first pancreas transplant had taken place in the US way back in 1966,” says Dr Vaidya who is in Kochi to spread awareness about the advantages of going for the transplantation especially for patients who can't manage their diabetes with insulin and those with diabetic retinopathy.

“After the transplantation, the patient can live like any normal person and can take food containing sugar the way other normal people do. They would be on immuno-suppressants the way a person who has undergone liver transplantation would be. In fact, pancreas transplantation can save the diabetes patients from developing other complications that can affect heart and eyes also,” says Dr Vaidya.

He said that as in the case of liver, the pancreas donor can either be a living person or a cadaver. “A portion of pancreas is taken from the living donor and it grows within the recipient after transplantation,” he says adding its cost comes to only that of kidney transplantation.

Dr Vaidya said given the fact that 50 per cent of the diabetes patients face kidney ailments to the point of going for dialysis, there is an increasing number of pancreas and kidney transplantation taking place simultaneously.

“A kidney patient cannot survive on dialysis for more than eight years while the two transplantations together can give a healthy life for a longer term,” he said, adding those who undergo pancreas transplantation can live up to 30 years.