Surgeons in Belgium have successfully transplanted four abdominal organs into a two-year-old child – the first time that such an operation has ever been successfully conducted on anyone so young in the country.
UZ Leuven university hospital announced in a statement on Wednesday that its doctors had transplanted a stomach, liver, pancreas and small intestine into the child, who suffered from a genetic disorder which meant that he was unable to ingest food orally.
Jacques Pirenne, who heads the abdominal transplant surgery unit at UZ Leuven, said that carrying out the so-called "multivisceral transplant" presented a host of difficulties.
"The organisation of a multivisceral transplant is challenging: we mobilise different teams and specialists at very short notice and sometimes in the middle of the night," he explained.
"We are therefore pleased to report that the young patient is doing well and can eat normally again."
This is also the first time that such an operation has ever been performed on anyone so young in the countries covered by Eurotransplant, a non-profit which coordinates transplants across eight EU Member States. In addition to Belgium, these countries include Austria, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Slovenia.
