Prague, Aug 24 (CTK) – Surgeons from the Prague-based Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine (IKEM) have been the first in the world to perform a unique liver transplant to save the life of a patient poisoned by paracetamol, IKEM spokeswoman Veronika Velcova has said.
More details will be released at a press conference on Thursday, she told CTK.
Without the surgery, the patient would have died in several hours.
The IKEM transplant surgeons combined several complicated methods and procedures that were never used together in the world before, Velcova announced.
Last year, the IKEM surgeons, as the first in the Czech Republic, performed an operation in which they removed only a half of liver and transplanted a liver lobe from a dead donor. The patient was a man suffering from acute liver failure also caused by paracetamol overdose.
Paracetamol is an active substance in many commonly used pain-killers.
Poisoning by paracetamol overdose is one of the most frequent causes of acute liver failure. Such patients would die within a few days without a liver transplant.
