Bengaluru: While bone marrow transplant is a life-saving procedure for various disorders like leukaemia, bone marrow failure, thalassemia and multiple myeloma, many patients cannot afford it.
But they may have reason to hope now as Gleneagles Global Hospitals in the city has cut down the treatment cost by almost half and made it affordable to many through its day-care bone marrow transplant (BMT) programme.
So far only five patients have been treated on a day-care basis at the hospital,which did their clinical assessment and gave them the care they needed daily as outpatients.
Says Dr Sachin Jadhav, group in charge, Hematology and BMT, Gleneagles Global Hospitals, Bengaluru, "We are the only team to perform day- care BMT in India. We saw it in Vancouver, Canada when we there on training and on returning to India, we thought it would be a feasible option for the numerous needy patients who were unable to pay for the expensive BMT procedure and died. As a team, we worked hard to get this up and running and now we have a sustainable and established day care BMT programme.”
One happy patient is 52-year-old Somashekar who had breathing difficulty and severe swelling of both legs along with kidney failure. On further investigation it was found that he had also developed a bone marrow condition called MIDD causing protein leak in the kidneys and kidney failure.
Having received most of his chemotherapy in Mysuru in coordination with the BMT team at BGS Gleneagles Global Hospitals, he underwent day- care BMT at almost half the cost of conventional inpatient BMT. Somashekar is now doing well and his disease is under control after two years of diagnosis.
