Only 3 per cent of patients in the country per year who need a renal transplant are able to get it suggests data accessed by DNA from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.
There has been no comprehensive study of the country’s renal ailments
NEW DELHI: Only 3 per cent of patients in the country per year who need a renal transplant are able to get it suggests data accessed by DNA from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.
This acute shortage of kidneys available for transplant is not due to a paucity of donors as has been recently projected by some doctors but because of a serious lack of infrastructure and exorbitant costs of post-transplant treatment.
Dr Sandeep Guleria, who heads the kidney transplant division at AIIMS said costs are so high that only a government servant covered under comprehensive group health scheme or a company policy are able to afford it. A patient needs to spend about Rs 15,000 every month on medicines for the rest of his life.”
“Of the 1,00,000 patients who suffer from chronic kidney diseases and who require a transplant, as many as 80,000 don’t even get to a doctor. The rest are filtered either by lack of infrastructure or high treatment costs. So in the end, just 3500 out of a lakh get a transplant annually,” Dr Guleria said.
“The real issue is that no accurate estimates of the extent of the disease exist,” says Dr Anoop Misra, Director, Department of Diabetes and metabolic diseases, Fortis hospital, New Delhi.
Aiims conducts 150 kidney transplants every year. While it subsidises costs of pathology tests, patients have to cough up the costs of medicines during and after transplant.
So far, the only study on the prevalence of chronic kidney disease in India was done by Aiims and the Indian Council for Medical Research between 2000 and 2004 in New Delhi.
Plagued by a funds crunch, it had to be re-structured to focus only on South Delhi. The results, published in International journals of nephrology in 2005 pegged the prevalence of chronic kidney diseases at 0.79 per cent of the population.
“The government needs to focus on spending more on chronic kidney diseases as a major non-communicable disease,” said Dr SK Agarwal, Additional Professor, Department of Nephrology, AIIMS.
Dr H Jauhari, Chairperson, Department of Renal Transplant, Sir Ganga Ram hospital said his hospital performs 10 kidney transplants every month.”For every one person who gets a transplant, there are at least 40 who are not able to get it.”
t_mayank@dnaindia.net
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