5-Month-Old Receives Liver Lobe

A five-month-old infant underwent a liver lobe transplant at Schneider Children’s, making her the youngest and smallest liver recipient in Israel. The infant suffered from a severe life-threatening disease and needed a liver transplant to survive. Her mother donated the liver lobe after both infant and mother underwent successful tests for donor matching. Special preparations were needed for the complex transplant including the acquisition of instrumentation to accommodate her tiny vessels.

A living-related liver lobe transplant is a particularly complicated operation requiring mobilization of a unique medical team comprising pediatric transplant surgeons, ultrasound technicians, gastroenterologists, anesthetists, intensivists and operating room nurses. The two procedures are conducted simultaneously with the donor in an adjoining operating room. Once the liver lobe has been removed, the organ is transferred directly to the recipient waiting in the operating room next door.

Schneider Children’s also performed another complex procedure recently in an 11-year-old boy who underwent both a kidney transplant and enlargement of his bladder. The child had suffered from kidney failure and received an altruistic organ donation.

Both transplant surgeries were conducted by teams in the Organ Transplantation Division at Schneider Children’s headed by Prof. Eytan Mor, and included senior transplant surgeons, Dr. Michael Gurewitz and Dr. Sigal Eisner, urologists Dr. David Ben Meir, head of the Urology Unit and Dr. Bezalel Sivan, and anesthetists Dr. Yaacov Katz, Dr. Evelynne Trabkin, and Dr. Konstantin Nikarsov. Following the surgeries, the children were first hospitalized in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit headed by Dr. Elhanan Nahum, and then transferred to Pediatrics C headed by Prof. Yaacov Amir. Follow-up care of the infant will be conducted by senior gastroenterologist Dr. Yael Mozer-Glatzberg and a team in the Nephrology Institute headed by Dr. Miriam Davidovits will attend to the 11-year-old. The transplants were coordinated by nurses Naomi Zanhandler and Michal Shafir.

Schneider Children’s Medical Center conducts the majority of organ transplants in children in Israel and is one of the few hospitals in the world capable of performing a number of organ transplantation surgeries at the same time. Since its inception, Schneider Children’s has conducted about 500 heart, lung, liver and kidney transplants in infants, children and adolescents, with success rates on a par with leading institutions in the world.