A team of doctors at the government-run Guwahati Medical College Hospital (GMCH) in Assam successfully treated a rare dialysis-induced skin ailment by performing kidney transplant on the patient.
A report on the operation conducted on a 30-year-old woman patient in December last year by a team of doctors from the super-speciality unit of GMCH led by Dr Sasanka Kumar Barua recently appeared in Cureus, a US-based medical journal.
The skin condition called Pseudoporphyria in which multiple lesions that look like burnt and peeling skin occur all over the body of a patient with kidney failure when they start hemodialysis, a process to filter waste and water from blood when the kidneys stop functioning normally.
“Pseuporphyria has been seen in patients with end stage renal (kidney) disease on hemodialysis. No treatment has proved efficacious in the treatment of pseudoporphyria. The patient was treated with all available medication in (medical) literature, but wasn’t relieved,” the article in Cureus mentioned.
“However, all skin lesions completely healed within 22 days post renal transplantation. Renal transplantation proved to be the cure for dialysis-induced pseudoporphyria resistant to conventional drug therapy. It is likely the first case of pseudoporphyria caused by dialysis that has been successfully treated with kidney transplantation,” it added.
