A twenty-year-old Delhi resident suffering from rare heart disease was transplanted with a heart from a 17-year brain dead girl from Vadodara by doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi amid the conditions created by COVID-19.
It was a coordinated effort with Delhi police providing "a green corridor" to the ambulance carrying the live heart and it reached AIIMS from Delhi Airport Terminal-2 in 12 minutes.
The heart transplant process on Thursday took about seven hours.
Dr Milind Hote, Professor in the Department of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgery at AIIMS, said the heart was procured from a 17-year-old girl from Vadodara who was declared brain dead at a hospital.
"As soon as we got the information about the availability of donor's heart in Vadodara, we alerted our team for a possible heart transplant at AIIMS and evaluated the waiting list of patients at our centre," Dr Hote said.
A team of AIIMS doctors flew to Vadodara on Thursday morning to procure the heart with Organ Retrieval Banking Orgzation (ORBO) officials facilitating the process.
The doctors' team from AIIMS flew back from Vadodra in the afternoon and reached Delhi airport by the evening.
The 20-year-old male patient who received the cadaver heart is a resident of West Delhi.
Dr Hote said he has been diagnosed with a rare heart complication called Ebstein's anomaly.
"In this poor health condition, the heart becomes very weak. His right side of the heart was not able to pump the blood," he told .
Dr Hote said the patient was very sick and had been coming to AIIMS for the last four years for the treatment.
"Delhi traffic police helped in providing a green corridor of 18 km to the ambulance for transporting the live heart from the airport to AIIMS. It reached AIIMS within 12 minutes from Terminal 2, Delhi Airport," he said.
( With inputs from ANI )
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