Kochi (Kerala):Doctors at a private hospital here carried out shoulder-level full arm transplants on two patients, billed as the country's first such operations. A patient from Karnataka and another from Iraq, who lost both their hands due to electric shock, have successfully undergone bilateral hand transplants at Amrita Hospital here, with limbs harvested from donors who were victims of fatal road accidents in Kerala.
The duo who underwent these surgeries are 25-year-old Amaresh and 29-year-old Yousif Hasan Saeed Al Zuwaini.
"The transplanted hands on Amaresh belonged to Vinod, a 54-year-old man, an employee in a Gulf country. On a visit to his native place in Kollam district, Kerala, he had a fatal traffic accident when his motorcycle collided with a private bus. Vinod suffered a serious head injury and was declared brain dead on January 4, 2022. Vinod's family readily agreed to donate his various organs, including his hands, following his death," the hospital said in a release.
Amaresh, who is unmarried, suffered a severe injury in September 2017 due to electric shock while repairing a charged electric cable. His hands sustained multiple fractures and electric burns. He was rushed to a hospital where doctors had to amputate both his hands to save his life. While the right hand was amputated at the elbow, the left hand had to be severed right at the shoulder level, the hospital said.
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Amaresh later approached the hand transplant team of Amrita Hospital and subsequently got registered in the Kerala Network for Organ Sharing (KNOS) as an organ recipient waiting for organ transplantation. "After a pair of hands were harvested for transplantation from Vinod, Amaresh was rushed to Amrita Hospital on January 5, 2022, where Dr. Subramania Iyer and Dr. Mohit Sharma led a team of 20 surgeons and 10 anesthetists to successfully transplant both the limbs in a marathon surgery," the hospital said.
"Shoulder-level full-arm transplants are quite rare. In fact, this is only the third such surgery in the world. The higher the level of amputation, the more challenging the hand transplant becomes," Dr Iyer said. Meanwhile, Yousif Hasan, an interior construction worker from Baghdad and a father of two girls, was involved in an accident in 2019 when he was drilling a wall. He was rushed to a hospital, where doctors had to amputate both his hands from the elbow to save his life.
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"Six months after the accident, Yousif arrived at Amrita Hospital in Kochi to learn more about the hand transplant procedure and in July 2021, registered with the Kerala Organ Sharing Registry," the hospital said. A 39-year-old woman, Ambily, an Alappuzha native, met with an accident and was rushed to Amrita Hospital where she was declared brain dead. Her family readily agreed to donate her organs. On February 2, 2022, Ambily's hands were successfully attached to Yousif in a 16-hour surgery, led by Dr. Iyer and Dr. Sharma.
