15 July 2010
Ludhiana, India
THE Christian Medical College and Hospital claims to have conducted a rare liver surgery on a five month old child last week. The boy was brought to the hospital when he was two and an half month and suffered from jaundice. Doctors said he passed white stools and dark urine from the second day since his birth. Investigations showed he had biliary atresia wherein the liver did not function due to a block in the connection between the liver and the intestine.
This disease is known as extra hepatic biliary atresia in which the common bile duct between the liver and the small intestine is blocked or absent.
A five–hour long surgery was performed by a team of three paediatric surgeons – Dr William Bhatti, Dr Dhruv Ghosh and Dr Nandini K Bedi.
The surgery known as Kasai’s Portoenterostomy, involves the removal of affected bile duct which was outside the liver and creating an alternative drainage system from the liver to the intestine and restructuring the small intestines. Doctors said the surgery was successful and the baby was recuperating. His jaundice, too, has come down.
Dr William Bhatti, head of Department of Paediatric Surgery, said normally physiological jaundice appears in a child on the second or third day and the child recovers by the seventh day.
If jaundice continues or increases after the seventh days, the child needs to be investigated.
If not treated timely, the biliary atresia leads to liver failure, for which the liver transplant is the only option. It was the first such surgery performed here.
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