A Society for Advanced Heart and Lung Disease (SAHLD) was launched on Saturday by the heart-lung transplant team of the Apollo Hospitals, who will work with researchers at IIT-Madras to look into lung disease, transplant outcomes and genomics.
The Society will also promote awareness of heart and lung disease and transplant options available, both among physicians and patients, doctors said. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in India among non-communicable diseases, and lung disease is a growing problem, they said.
Speaking on the sidelines of symposium on interstitial lung disease (ILD), pulmonary hypertension and lung transplantation that the hospital and SAHLD hosted on Saturday, Ganesh Raghu, director, Center for Interstitial Lung Disease, University of Washington Medical Center, said that when all options in medical therapy had been exhausted, patients and physicians often got frustrated. The newly-launched Society could give patients hope — through surgical interventions such as lung transplants. Interstitial lung disease refers to a group of disorders that cause progressive scarring of the lung tissue.
The research aspect of the Society will look into changes in the cellular parameters of patients in order to develop a better predictive model for morbidity and mortality — to try and understand why some patients have better outcomes than others in heart or lung procedures, explained heart and transplant surgeon Paul Ramesh and Madhulika Dixit, associate professor, department of biotechnology, IIT-Madras.
One of the problems in India, said T. Sunder, also a heart-lung transplant surgeon at Apollo, was that patients came in very late. Also, he said, the donor pool was limited: from every 100 donors, only 17 to 20 lungs were usable, either because of chest injuries, endemic tuberculosis or other causes. There is still not much data on lung disease available in India,and the burden of ILD in India is high and growing, said Dr. Sunder.
The one-day symposium had over 300 delegates, and was inaugurated by chairman, Apollo Hospitals Group, Prathap C. Reddy.
