News & Events

10th May 2018, Chennai: Kauvery Hospitals, a leading multi-specialty and tertiary care hospital chain, successfully performed a complicated renal transplantation on a 7-year-old boy, Master Pritish, from Chennai.

Pritish was born with an abnormality in the urinary passage with a condition called vesicoureteral reflux, and was severely underweight for his age, weighing less than 15 kgs. Normally, the urine that is produced from the kidney should come down through the urinary bladder and it should go out, but in Pritish, the urinary bladder was abnormal, so instead of the urine coming forwards, it was leaking backwards as well. This predisposed the child to repeated urinary infections and the child was prone to get into irreversible kidney failure over a period of time.

The team of Nephrology experts at Kauvery Hospitals, led by Dr. Balasubramaniyam, Chief Nephrologist, performed one of the most complicated yet successful renal transplantation on Pritish. This has not just given the child a new lease of life, but has also created an awareness that children who are born with congenital abnormalities of the kidney and urinary bladder can get a successful transplant.

Giving details at a press briefing, Dr. Balasubramaniyam said, “In 20 years of our experience of having done over 700 transplants, the team has never done a surgery like this. Apart from the risk of transplant in such a young kid, there were complications as three surgeries were performed on the same day. The option was to use one of the kidneys of his blood relatives, and in the boy’s case, we were glad that his father volunteered to donate. In any kidney transplantation surgery, the original kidneys are not removed unless in very rare circumstances where kidneys are the main reason for the infection or uncontrolled blood pressure. However, in this child, the kidneys were infected due to repeated urinary infection, and thus they had to be removed. The ideal situation was to remove the kidney, wait for the wounds to heal and then do a transplantation. However, if you remove the kidneys one month before the transplantation, the child has to undergo dialysis. In this case, we had to rectify the bladder first so the kidney could be implanted into the bladder. If it is not rectified, problems that happened to the old kidney can happen to the new kidney as well. After discussions between the nephrologists and urologists, we decided to avoid dialysis, as it is difficult to do dialysis in a small child. Thus, this boy underwent one kidney removal, a transplant and a bladder reconstruction, all in a day. It’s been more than one month since the surgery and the boy is fine with proper post-operative care and appropriate medication.”

“Donating my kidney is possibly the best gift I could give my son”, said Mr. Jyothy Prakash, Pritish’s father. “My son has been suffering with an abnormality in his kidney from birth, and it’s been very traumatic for the family all these years. Our family took a bold decision to go for a transplant and I am extremely grateful to the doctors at Kauvery hospital who took up the case of my son as a challenge and completed the surgeries successfully.”

Dr. Aravindan Selvaraj, Executive director, Kauvery Hospitals said, “Thanks to the efforts of Dr. Balasubramaniyam and his experienced team of experts who have been doing pioneering work in the field of Nephrology. Just in the last one year alone, we have done four complex renal transplants on children ranging from 7 – 12 years of age. In the case of Pritish, he could be among the smallest children in terms of body weight to have successfully undergone renal transplant. Kauvery Hospitals looks forward to many more of such remarkable milestones in the future.”

About Kauvery Hospital:

Kauvery Hospitals is ‘A new Age Family Hospital’ with Multi Specialty Clinical Expertise and a pioneer in the ‘HealthCare Provider’ industry, making healthcare affordable. Kauvery is one of the few corporate hospital chains to successfully integrate operations into Tier 1 cities after launching into Tier 2 cities. It is also one of the few hospitals founded by Medical experts and managed by business professionals with a keen focus on delivering personalised and specialised health care with warmth.

Kauvery Hospitals is currently a 1200 bed hospital group with presence in Chennai, Trichy, Hosur and Salem in addition to planned entry in new markets.

Apart from having diverse Multispecialty tertiary care expertise, Kauvery Hospitals house one of three ‘Cardiac Centres of Excellence in South India’ and the only one in Tiruchirappalli (Trichy).

In today’s times where the healthcare industry is more and more commoditized, Kauvery Hospitals stands tall with its promise of making medical expertise and technology truly affordable with empathy and care at every stage of a person’s healthcare needs.