Liver transplant is a life-saving treatment but lack of awareness is denying this opportunity to many patients, a surgeon at the Apollo Multispeciality Hospital said last week.
Ramdip Ray, the head of liver transplant and GI surgery at the Apollo Multispeciality Hospital, said there needed to be greater awareness both among donors and recipients.
Even a section of doctors need more awareness and they should advise a patient at the right time for transplant, Ray said.
“More and more people need to come forward and donate organs. Many other cities are doing better than Kolkata in terms of liver transplants. We need to raise more awareness about this,” he said.
He said when a patient reaches stage C of liver cirrhosis, a liver transplant
was the only option left. However, the patient needs to undergo a transplant before other organs start getting affected.
“Often what happens is that patients come at a very late stage when other organs have got affected. They must come for a transplant before they reach this stage,” said Ray.
Ray is part of a team of five surgeons at Apollo that conducted about 30 transplants in the last two years. In nearly 20 of these, a portion of the liver from a living person was taken for transplant.
People who undergo transplants can live healthy lives and get back to daily work within a couple of months, said Ray.
“There are many examples of people with transplanted livers leading normal lives,” he added.