4 lakh patients face organ failure a year: Doctor

GUWAHATI, May 23: “About 4 lakh new patients encounter organ failure each year in India. Out of these, 1.5 lakh suffer from Chronic Kidney Disease and less than 5 per cent patients receive kidney transplant. While 15 to 20 per cent kidney patients are treated with dialysis, the remaining 75 per cent die without treatment.” This has been revealed by the most prolific kidney transplant surgeon in the country, Padma Shri Dr Sarbeswar Sahariah, Vice Chairman, KIMS Hospital, Hyderabad.

Dr Sahariah was delivering a talk on “Evolution of Organ Donation and Transplantation in India” at Guwahati. Addressing hundreds of students and teachers, the renowned surgeon said that Type 2 Diabetes and High Blood Pressure are the two main problems that lead to kidney failure. He said that while more than one lakh patients need kidney transplant every year, only 5000 transplantations take place.

According to Dr Sahariah, organ transplantation has become the most accepted mode of treatment for patients with terminal organ failure throughout the world for a better quality of life and increased longevity. However, awareness about organ donation is very low even among the educated class, he added. Making an in depth power point presentation, Dr Saharia, who hails from Mangaldai in Assam, said that the potential cadaver donors are those having head injury due to RTA, brain hemorrhage, ischemic brain injury and inoperable brain tumor. He stated that the Government of India has implemented the Transplantation of Human Organ Act 1994 in order to streamline and regulate transplantation activity in the country, to encourage and regulate cadaver donor transplantation, to stop commercial dealing in human organs and to accept brain death also as definition of death.

According to statistics of Dr Saharia, who has conducted 3500 living transplantation and 200 cadaver transplantation, most of the donors in India have been women. In the living related transplantations, 76 per cent donors have been mothers while 24 per cent were fathers.