LASUTH celebrates first kidney transplant

Doctors at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), Ikeja, yesterday celebrated the first successful kidney transplant ever done in Lagos tertiary hospital. The feat, conducted on a 56-year-old unnamed male patient, was after several years of training and infrastructure development in the hospital.

Chief Medical Director (CMD) of the hospital, Prof. Adewale Oke, said the feat, by a team of homegrown doctors, has opened the way for several other patients with advanced renal conditions to be fully treated and at affordable cost in the country.

Oke explained that the patient, who was at the end-stage renal disease, was selected for the maiden surgery, and after about six-hour surgery (organ harvesting and implantation), the operation was successful.

The elated CMD said: “LASUTH has come of age and we are glad. We are able to harness what we have and so we will continue to improve on infrastructure. Kidney transplant is not free; it cannot be free, but with us doing it here, the cost will be affordable (compared to traveling to India or United Kingdom for operation).”

he said.
He added that the feat has complemented the state government’s infrastructure efforts in developing the state-of-the-art Cardiac and Renal Centre in Gbagada.

Head of the surgical team, Dr. Olugbenga Awobusuyi, said that the journey started some 10 years ago, when the hospital began capacity building of specialists with training courses done in Brazil, Kenya and United Kingdom.
Today, Awobusuyi said, we now have confidence that we could do more of renal transplantation of patients around here.
He said that the latest of several services offered in the hospital would help stop the trend of patients going to India and returning with complications that often eventually kill them.

Awobusuyi, a neurologist, said that the patient, who is still recuperating in the ward, had to be persuaded to have the operation here in Nigeria instead of India, his first choice. After a year of dialysis, the patient came up with a donor (nephew), which made LASUTH to consider the operation.

LASUTH management said that where compatible donors are readily available, the procedure is now more possible in the Lagos tertiary hospital.

Kidney transplantation or renal transplantation is the organ transplant of a kidney into a patient with end-stage renal disease. Kidney transplantation is typically classified as deceased-donor (formerly known as cadaveric) or living-donor transplantation depending on the source of the donor organ.

Living-donor renal transplants are further characterized as genetically related (living-related) or non-related (living-unrelated) transplants, depending on whether a biological relationship exists between the donor and recipient