Patients need financial backup for lifelong medicines after heart transplant

Lack of financial backup which stops the heart transplant recipient to intake medicines for the rest of their life is concerning the doctors. This week, after saving the life of 62-year-old Andheri resident, a team of doctors from a private hospital in Mumbai has completed 100 heart transplant operation in four years.

According to the doctors, the government should help the recipient with money for the medicines. While the cost of the surgery is around Rs 15 lakh to Rs 20 lakh excluding the transport charges, if the patient stops the intake of the medicines which later causes health issues, the cost again increases to lakhs of rupees. Every year a biopsy is done on patients for follow up.

Dr Anvay Mulay, Head-Cardiac Transplant Team of Fortis Hospital, Mulund, said, "After 1 to 1.5 years, few of my patients stopped the intake of medicines due to financial issues because of which their heart got rejected and they died. This would have been prevented if they had taken a proper course of medicine for a lifetime. Most of the patients do not open up about their financial problems."

Talking about awareness in public, he added, "Awareness level of a cadaver organ donation has increased. In compare to international standards, if the one-year survival is 90%, we have one-year survival of around 86%, which is not bad. After heart transplant, patients need to take medicines throughout their life without fail. In our hospital's cases, the survival rate is around 76%. About 10% of the rates have dropped because few patients have stopped taking medicines due to lack of money. On an average maximum cost related to medicines is Rs15,000 per month for the rest of their life."

Speaking about the challenges related to the heart transplant, Dr Anvay Mulay, said, "We have learned from the foreign countries and using well-equipped techniques. The biggest challenge is to convince the recipient about the heart transplant. For 47 years there was no awareness about the heart transplant in Mumbai. Patients did not know about the concept because doctors hardly advised them about the transplant. While few patients knew about it, they preferred going to the USA and UK for the transplant. In Mumbai, there was no waiting list for the heart transplant. To get a match of a donor and a recipient was a challenge because of which more recipient needed to be convinced to start a waiting list."

In India, organ donation was more popular in the southern states compared to other states. the number of cadaver donations was high in Tamil Nadu in comparison to other states.