Hanoi (VNS/VNA) - Doctors from the Hanoi-based Viet Duc Hospital haveannounced to successfully conduct the first transplant of two lungs from abrain-dead donor on a cancer patient.

Vietnam has so far successfully carried out three transplants of lungs but thisis the first time Vietnamese doctors performed the transplant of two at thesame time successfully.

This was also the first time the Vietnamese doctors could conduct thecomplicated transplant without assistance from foreign experts, said hospitaldirector Tran Binh Giang at a press briefing on December 24.

The transplant of lung was considered the most complicated among organs,according to Doctor Nguyen Huu Uoc, head of the hospital’s Cardio-vascular andThoracic Surgery Department.

Vietnam has so far conducted 3,200 kidney transplant operations, 105 livertransplant operations, 27 heart transplant operations and only three cases oflung transplants.   

The first two transplants of lungs were performed by Vietnamese doctors andtheir foreign partners at Military Hospitals 103 and 108 in Hanoi.

The 17-year-old boy has suffered from Pulmonary Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis,an uncommon cystic interstitial lung disease without complete treatmentmeasures. He has been treated for five years at different hospitals and was invery bad condition before the transplant.

The lungs were donated from a 40-year-old man from the northern province ofNinh Binh.

It took the doctors 14 hours to perform the life-saving surgery.

Over the past ten days, the patient’s health conditions started to show signsof recovery, proving technical success of the surgery, according to doctor Uoc.

Together with the lung transplant, doctorsfrom Viet Duc Hospital performed at the same time a heart transplant for a60-year-old man, a liver transplant for a 63-year-old woman and a kidneytransplant for a 41-year-old man.

Meanwhile, the Pediatrics Hospital No2 in HCM City conducted another kidneytransplant on a 15-year-old boy with the kidney transported from Vietnam Duc Hospital.

All the organs were donated by the brain-dead man from Ninh Binh province.

In order to carry out the multi-organ transplant operations, Viet Duc Hospitalhad to mobilise the participation of more than 100 doctors to perform thesurgery to take out all donated organs from the donor in six hours.

Meanwhile, at the same time, four other surgery rooms at Viet Duc Hospital andone at Pediatrics Hospital No2 in HCM City were ready to receive and transplantthe organs to the patients.

With this success, Viet Duc Hospital set a new record to perform surgeries totake and transplant the most organs at the same time.

Over the last five years, there were19,300 donors that were brain dead or had no heartbeat, according to theNational Coordination Centre for Organ Transplantation.

In 2013, the centre was set up because organ donation in the country had beenlimited.

After a seven-year-old girl from Hanoi, Nguyen HaiAn, donated her cornea to two people – a73-year-old woman and a 42-year-old man – in February of this year, the centrereceived thousands of organ and tissue donor registrations.

This year, the centre has cooperated with Vietnam Airlines to transport tissueand organs on its flights for free.-VNS/VNA