One-year-old toddler thrives after liver transplant – UAE
Abu Dhabi: A successful transplant has saved a one-year-old boy in Abu Dhabi from dying due to a congenital liver disease, Gulf News has learnt.
Baby Hamad’s surgery was miraculous not only because it was performed at such a young age but also because he weighed only 4.5 kilograms at the time. Now aged 16 months, the boy is recovering well and is a source of much joy to his parents.
“My son was always crying and he was never happy or comfortable in the year before the procedure. Now, he interacts with us and is just as happy as a healthy baby,” Mohammad Raheem, Hamad’s father, told Gulf News.
Raheem is a 25-year-old administrative executive from Pakistan, and Hamad is his second son. Soon after Hamad was born to Raheem and wife Zarjan, 23, in April 2017, something seemed amiss. He showed symptoms of jaundice, including a persistently yellow complexion, but nothing was diagnosed until the family returned to their home in Abu Dhabi four months later.
A series of checks at a government hospital revealed that Hamad had been born with extrahepatic biliary atresia, a condition in which the liver’s bile ducts do not develop normally. In Hamad’s case, the ducts were outside the liver, and would not deliver the bile to his intestines for digestion.
The family sought advice from Dr Kaiser Raja, consultant for liver diseases and transplantation at Aster Hospital Dubai.
https://gulfnews.com/uae/health/one-year-old-toddler-thrives-after-liver-transplant-1.2253848