A 5-year-old boy with thalassemia is the first patient in Italy to have received an organ from a living donor : his father.
It happened yesterday at the Giovanni XXIII hospital in Bergamo , where a part of a lung was transplanted . For the same disease, the father had already donated marrow to the child, a donation which however caused a reaction – the so-called graft-versus-host disease – with which the transplanted cells attack the recipient's organs. The rejection , in this case, had caused irreversible lung damage to the child. Father and son are currently hospitalized with a reserved prognosis but the doctors are confident.
«It is an extremely complex operation, performed in a center that has great experience in pediatric and lung transplantation, and which once again demonstrates the level of excellence of Italian transplantology » comments the director of the National Transplant Center Massimo Cardillo . «A lot of caution is still needed – explains Cardillo – while waiting for the prognosis of the little recipient and his donor to be resolved, but everything is going as expected. The use of the lung lobe of the child's father, already a marrow donor, constitutes an important immunological advantage : the precedents in Europe are very rare and sporadic and in fact, despite the fact that for 10 years Italian law has provided for the possibility of donating the lung lobe while still alive , specific authorization from the National Transplant Center was needed for this first attempt».
For the director of the Cnt "the hope is that this donation will lead to a complete success of the transplant and, despite its exceptional nature, can further convince citizens of the importance of organ donation and in particular give a positive boost to transplants, both as a deceased and as a living donor: in Italy there are many patients waiting and the need is not yet fully satisfied".
(Unioneonline/vf)