Minister: Organ transplant program helps save hundreds of patients with very low quality of life

October 21, 2019  16:46

A national organ transplant program from cadaveric donors will help save hundreds of patients with very low quality of life, for example, people with chronic renal failure who have to regularly receive hemodialysis throughout their lives, Armenian Health Minister Arsen Torosyan told reporters.

According to him, the organ transplant program is expected to be implemented in the next 2-3 years and requires preparing infrastructures, an electronic health system, and also solving a number of legal issues before the implementation

"With this program we will save the lives of people who today have a very, very low quality of life. These are primarily patients with chronic renal failure receiving hemodialysis," he said.

According to him, today about 1000 patients in Armenia receive hemodialysis, and without an organ transplant program from cadaveric donors, they are forced to go to the hospital every four days to get hemodialysis. A kidney transplant will provide these people with a higher quality of life.

First of all, according to the minister, the emphasis will be on kidney transplants. To date, such transplants are made in the country only from living donors, and recently the number of transplants has grown by 2 times. Only in the Arabkir medical center, according to the minister, two kidney transplants are done every month.

According to the minister, the corneal transplantation has been done in Armenia for a long time, but the cornea was brought from abroad. If the cadaveric donation program works, more corneas will appear at the doctors' disposal and more patients will have access to this operation.

As for the transplantation of other organs - the liver, heart, lungs, pancreas, and so on - these surgeries are more complicated, but it will be necessary to start doing them too. Moreover, colleagues from Belarus, where this sphere is very developed, will help the Armenian specialists with the implementation of the program and with the first transfers. Just the other day they will help to conduct a second liver transplant in Armenia here - this time to an underage patient.

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