Success story: liver transplantation in Almaty

Liver transplantation surgery was performed succesfuly in the Municipal Clinical Hospital #7 in Almaty, Tengrinews reports. Svetlana Kaipova, 54, was hospitalized with a liver cirrhosis in September 2013. Fortunately for the patient, her 25 y.o. daughter Gulshad became her donor. The surgery took place on December 16, 2013. During the surgery, Svetlana whole liver was removed, as it was not functioning anymore. 60% of Gulshad’s liver was transplanted to Mrs. Kaipova. The Kazakhstan surgeons conducted this complex surgery with the help of their Indian counterparts. The surgeons said that the livers of both the daughter and the mother would regenerate to their normal size soon. In practice, 50-70% of liver that is removed from a healthy donor, then the transplanted liver regenerates to the full size and capacity in four or six weeks. Gulshad has already been released from the hospital. The liver transplantation is considered the most complex surgery from the technical point of view. It can take from 4 to 18 hours to perform and is more difficult than even a heart transplantation. The difficulty lies in stitching very fine vessel, some of them as small as 2 mm in diameter. Every year in Kazakhstan three thousand patients require a kidney transplantation, more than a thousand patients are in the need of a new heart and around 230 patients must have a lungs translation. Mrs. Kaipova is one of the lucky people who got their very needed liver transplantation, while there are almost a thousand of people in desperate need of one. By Dmitriy Khegai