Cleveland Clinic Taking Kidneys Through Navel
A minimally-invasive surgery lets doctors pull kidneys through the bellybutton.
July 17, 2008— -- CLEVELAND (AP) - Brad Kaster donated a kidney to his father thisweek, and he barely has a scar to show for it.
The kidney was removed through a single incision in hisbellybutton, a surgical procedure Cleveland Clinic doctors say willreduce recovery time and leave almost no scarring.
"The actual incision point on me is so tiny I'm not getting anypain from it," Kaster, 29, said Wednesday. "I can't even seeit."
Kaster was the 10th donor to undergo the procedure at theCleveland Clinic. Dr. Inderbir S. Gill and colleagues at theresearch hospital on Thursday were to perform the 11th suchprocedure, which Gill said could make kidney donations morepalatable by sharply reducing recovery time.
More than 80,000 Americans are awaiting kidney transplants. Lastyear, there were about 13,300 kidney donors in the U.S., and about45 percent were living donors, according to the Organ Procurementand Transplantation Network.
The first 10 recipients and donors whose transplants used thesingle-incision navel procedure have done well, according to theresearchers. They report on the first four patients in the Augustissue of the Journal of Urology.
Preliminary data from the first nine donors who had thebellybutton procedure showed they recovered in about just under amonth, while donors who underwent the standard laparoscopicprocedure with four to six "key hole" incisions took just longerthan three months to recover.
The clinic says the return to work time for single-point donorsis about 17 days, versus 51 for traditional multi-incisionlaparoscopic procedure.
"For me, that's huge so I can get back to work," said Kaster,a self-employed optometrist.
Patients of the new procedure were on pain pills less than fourdays on average, compared with 26 days for laparoscopic patients.
"This represents an advance, for the field of surgery ingeneral," said Gill, who predicted the bellybutton entry would beused increasingly for major abdominal surgery in a "nearlyscar-free" way.
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