Jasmine makes history after transplants from both parents

[okarol]

Jasmine makes history after transplants from both parents
CHRIS WATT   March 20 2009

A five-year-old girl has cheated death and made medical history by receiving living organ transplants from both of her parents.

Jasmine Mirza is well following the operations and, after spending more than a quarter of her life in hospital, she has now started school.

The young pupil, from Farnborough, Hampshire, first fell ill when she was just seven months old. Though unable to diagnose the precise nature of her condition, doctors realised she was suffering from acute liver failure and would require a liver transplant if she was to survive.
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When the severity of her condition came to light, Jasmine's father, Sohrab Mirza, offered to donate part of his own liver to save her life. Though this operation was a success, the drugs administered to Jasmine to stop her body rejecting the transplanted organ began causing kidney failure.

Again, 38-year-old Mr Mirza offered to step in with his own organs, but tests run by Jasmine's medical team showed that his kidney was an unsuitable match. At this point, the young girl was having to travel to specialist facilities in London every second day for dialysis, her family said.

As her condition deteriorated, Jasmine's 33-year-old mother, Cathie Locke, agreed to donate one of her kidneys to her ailing daughter. Doctors discovered that the organ was a good match, and a 10-hour transplant operation was successfully carried out.

Speaking once doctors had declared his daughter saved after the groundbreaking operations, Mr Mirza told reporters: "She is more part of us now than she ever would have been. As a parent, you would always say you would give an arm and a leg to help your children. It is amazing that we have been able to do that."

Doctors treating Jasmine at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital in London said they were not aware of any other cases where both a child's parents had acted as living donors to save their offspring. It is not unusual for one parent to pass an organ to a child, but this is the only known case where both parents have participated in transplant operations.

Following the operations late last year, Jasmine grew well enough to start school in January. She still has a feeding tube in her nose, but doctors hope it will be removed soon. Despite the success of the transplants, though, Jasmine will require daily drugs for the rest of her life and she will not be able to drink alcohol.

An operation carried out in similar circumstances in 1991, when US doctors attempted to transfer lobes from two parents' lungs to those of their dying child, was unsuccessful, fuelling criticism over the ethics of living transplants.

In recent years, however, as medical ability and survival rates have improved, debate over live donors has largely died down.

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