Heart diseases are growing extensively in the Middle East and around the world. For some patients, despite all efforts to treat and reverse the effects of heart diseases, heart function worsens, making a transplantation the best option.
“Heart transplant surgery has evolved extensively in the past few years, when the first human heart transplant was performed in 1967. Over the years, there have been several advances, leading to a success rate of 80-90 percent across the globe,” said Dr Alla Gopala Krishna Gokhale, a Heart-Lung Transplant,Cardiothoracic and Minimal Access Surgeon at Apollo Hospitals(Hyderabad, India) that has a representative office in Sharjah in the UAE.
In his career, Dr Gokhale has performed more than 15000 open heart surgeries and trained scores of surgeons from India and abroad in Minimal Access Heart Surgery. As founder secretary of Heart Failure Society, India, his stellar contributions in the field of cardiac surgery including heart and lung transplantation and selfless service to the poorer sections of society have earned him Padmasree from the Government of India and Ugadi Puraskar from the Government of Andhra Pradesh. Dr Gokhale is the first in India to have performed combined heart and kidney transplants as well as perform five bypass grafts through keyhole surgery and one of the very surgeons who does heart, single lung as well as double lung transplants..
It has been noted that over 5000 heart transplantations are performed every year across the globe and so far over 120000 transplants are done in the world . In 2018, nearly 215 heart and 55 lung transplantations were undertaken in India, of which approximately 15 are from Gulf.
“We have observed that most of our patients from Gulf, suffer from dilated cardiomyopathy, which at most times requires a transplant. However, a transplant isn’t considered a cure for heart disease, rather it is a treatment that can significantly prolong the life of the recipient,” added Dr Gokhale.
According to Dr Gokhale, on an average, a heart transplant patient can survive an additional decade or more of life after surgery. Approximately 80-95 percent survive the first year, and each year following approximately 96 percent of those individuals survive. The average life of an adult after a heart transplant surgery is 11 years, which also depends on the age at the time of transplant and how well they follow their surgeon’s and transplant cardiologist’s instructions.
“Careful monitoring specialised medical care, balanced diet, good family support and regular exercise can increase the life span of heart transplant patients. Patients who undertake regular follow-ups have also been observed to have an increase in life-span,” concluded Dr Gokhale.
Some of the major conditions that lead to a heart transplant are heart failure, dilated cardiomyopathy, coronary artery disease, restrictive myopathy, hypertrophic cardio myopathy, valvular heart disease and congenital heart disease.
