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Dr Anand Khakkar - Liver Transplant Specialist - IndiaBelow is the video and transcript of the interview with Dr Anand Khakkar. Dr Khakkar has extensive experience in India and at the international level.
''I am basically a surgeon and I specialize in liver surgery. My particular area of interest in which I also received my fellowship training is organ transplant surgery. My current area of interest is liver and pancreas transplant, particularly living donor transplant as well as cadaveric liver transplant. We have set up, here at Apollo Hospital Chennai, a Center for Liver Diseases and Transplantation, which is a multi-disciplinary group of doctors and surgeons who participate in the care of patients who have complex liver and pancreatic diseases. I did my basic medical education - MBBS - and super-specialties in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu. And then I went on to do the American Society of Transplant Surgeons' accredited fellowship in liver and multi-organ transplantation and Hepatobiliary Surgery at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Subsequently, I spent another year doing another fellowship in Living Donor Liver Transplantation at the University of Pittsburgh, where I worked with Prof Dr Thomas E Starzl, the pioneer of liver transplant. And then I served for a year and a half as a faculty in the Columbia University, as a transplant and hepatobiliary surgeon. It has been a great experience here at Apollo of starting a [liver transplant] department and putting into practice whatever I learned. We have had a modest beginning. We have done about 7 liver transplants here and we also took 6 livers to Delhi and transplanted them there. Of these 13, two patients were from abroad. And we have two more coming for living donor transplants in the next 2-3 weeks. It has been an exciting time for me to be able to make a difference here. I love my job. The majority of our patients are Indian, though we have a fair bit of foreigners, here, too. I have the advantage of directly comparing what I saw in Pittsburgh, New York, and Western Ontario to what I see here. Currently, I would say our results are better than what I saw in Pittsburgh. [This is] partly because we are very conservative, we use very safe and good livers only. Pittsburgh being Pittsburgh, they take a lot of risks both on the donor and on the recipient side. Subsequently, their results are sometimes affected. Overall, among the Apollo Group of hospitals, we have a 87% success rate, which is very comparable to Pittsburgh and the like which have a success rate of 82-84%. When I was [studying] in the US, there was still a lot of skepticism about people going to Asian countries for treatment. That was mainly because people didn't know too much about India, they had their doubts about the availability of adequate technology, the hygiene measures, whether the doctors and nurses had the same concepts about infection control, medicines, whether the technical infrastructure, the instruments used would be comparable. Having worked there [in the West] and working here now, I really don't see any deficiencies at all. I have the same infrastructure support and the same trained manpower [here as it is there]. The reason why I continue to work here over and above the fact that this is home for me, is that am professionally well taken care of, in terms of availability of instruments, trained nurses, co-coordinators. Once you are inside the hospital, you would never really know whether you are in the US or any other country. We essentially have the same facilities. It is always better to get the transplant done faster, wherever you are in the world. Waiting for a cadaver organ always involves delay. Depending on whether or not they have cancer of the liver, or cirrhosis complications, they may have to use bridging therapies, if you don't have living donor. There is a disease severity score which is called the Mainz score. And, usually, whoever is listed in the US will know their Mainz score, because the organ procurement organization will inform them of their status on the waiting list depending on the Mainz score. Anyone with a Mainz score of more than 20 essentially carries a significant risk while waiting. To all such people, I would recommend that if they have a living donor in the family, they should actively consider living donation in order to expedite liver transplant. Being the two of us [me and my colleague], there is the advantage that one of us is always available. You have a surgeon who is adequately rested, well prepared, and adequately backed up in case of difficult times, which is very common in these kind of major undertakings. Even post-operatively, one of us is always available and present. Also, during the transplant surgery, one of us is attending the donor surgery, while the other would be attending the recipient surgery, allowing us to overlap. This reduces the cold ischaemia time. The cold ischaemia time significantly affects the outcome of the surgery. It is very important that you choose a team which has at least two surgeons who work in synchrony. I would say that is a very strong plus in our team.'' Submit free quote request on right for considering liver transplant by Dr. Anand Khakkar and other world class surgeons. |
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