For the first time liver transplantation will be done in Hyderabad by Global Hospitals from January 2003. This is the second hospital in the country to have this facility after Indraprastha Apollo in Delhi.

Internationally renowned liver transplant surgeons from King's College Hospital, London, will be carrying out liver transplants and complex liver surgeries at the hospital from the new year. Patient preparation for transplantation, which takes almost a month, is now under way at Global. Though Kamineni Hospital in Hyderabad has announced the setting up of a liver transplant unit in the city on Saturday, the facility will not be ready before the end of 2003.

Dr K Ravindranath, founder and Managing Director, said, 'The initiation of the liver transplantation programme is Global Hospitals' New Year gift to the nation. Patients in need of liver transplantation need no longer go abroad, wait indefinitely and spend a fortune." The hospital aims at carrying out liver transplantation at a fraction of the costs prevailing overseas and produces results on par with the best in the west.

London's King's College Hospital, a centre of excellence in Europe for liver diseases, has had the distinction of carrying out more than 2000 liver transplants in the last 11 years. Two leading lights of the hospital, Dr Nigel Heaton, chief of the liver transplant services, and Dr Mohammed Rela, who entered the Guinness Book of World Records by transplanting a liver in a five-day-old infant, will be in Hyderabad to extend their skills and expertise to end-stage liver disease victims.

There is no alternative to liver transplantation when the liver fails either because of viral diseases like hepatitis B and C, alcoholic cirrhosis or drug reaction to metabolic or autoimmune disorders. Liver failure can strike anybody at any age. Liver failure generally leads to death unless treated in time. Transplantation of a liver taken from a brain-dead person provides a new lease of life to the patient with a failed liver.

Global Hospitals, which has already carried out kidney and bone marrow transplants, is now all set to initiate the liver transplant programme.

Dr Dharmesh Kapoor, hepatologist, and Dr Kanchrla Ramesh, paediatric hepatologist, said 20 per cent of hepatitis B and C infected patients develop complications like cirrhosis, liver failure and liver cancer over a period of time. There are 47 million people chronically infected with hepatitis B and 23 million infected with hepatitis C in the country.

According to Dr P B N Gopal, anaestheologist and intensivist, the hospital has the finest equipment required to support patients with failing liver. It has MARS (Molecular Adsorbent Recirculating System), an albumin dialysis system, for removing toxins that accumulate in liver failure. It enables patients with end-stage disease and awaiting a donor liver for transplantation to tide over the critical period when the liver function at its lowest ebb.