Health - Kidney Removal with nary a scar

Surgeons can now do it through a bellybutton incision
CLEVELAND: Brad Kaster donated a kidney to his father this week, and he barely has a scar to show for it. The kidney was removed through a single incision in his bellybutton, a surgical procedure Cleveland Clinic doctors say will reduce recovery time and leave almost no scarring.
“The actual incision point on me is so tiny I’m not getting any pain from it,” Mr. Kaster, 29, said on Wednesday. “I can’t even see it.”
He was the 10th donor to undergo the procedure at the Cleveland Clinic. Inderbir S. Gill and colleagues at the research hospital on Thursday were set to perform the 11th such procedure, which Dr. Gill said could make kidney donations more palatable by reducing recovery time.
The first 10 recipients and donors whose transplants used the single-incision navel procedure have done well, according to the researchers. They report on the first four patients in the August issue of the Journal of Urology.
Preliminary data from the first nine donors who had the bellybutton procedure showed they recovered in just under a month, while donors who underwent the standard laparoscopic procedure with four to six “key hole” incisions took just longer than three months to recover.
The clinic says the return-to-work time for single-point donors is about 17 days, versus 51 for traditional multi-incision laparoscopic procedure. “For me, that’s huge so I can get back to work,” said Mr. Kaster, a self-employed optometrist.
Patients going for the new procedure were on pain pills less than four days on average, compared with 26 days for laparoscopic patients. “This represents an advance, for the field of surgery in general,” said Dr. Gill, who predicted the bellybutton entry would be used increasingly for major abdominal surgery in a “nearly scar-free” way. “Will this decrease the disincentive to [kidney] donation? I think the answer is yes.”
Paul Curcillo and Stephanie King of Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia developed a single-incision technique and Dr. Curcillo was the first to use the method to remove a woman’s gallbladder through her bellybutton in May 2007. They have since used it for a different kinds of surgery.
Dr. Curcillo said the bellybutton procedure “will definitely make things better” for the donor. “A donor is one of the most altruistic people you’ll ever meet. He’s giving his kidney up. So anything you can do to make it better for that patient, they deserve it,” he said.
Laparoscopic surgery revolutionised the operating room more than 15 years ago, replacing long incisions with small cuts and vastly reducing pain and recovery time. Researchers are now exploring ways to eliminate scars by putting instruments through the body’s natural openings like the mouth, nose and vagina to perform surgery.
The method used by the Cleveland Clinic takes advantage of the bellybutton to avoid a visible scar. Dr. Gill said the procedure was approved by the clinic’s internal review board as an extension of its laparoscopic surgical work. He has begun training other surgeons on the procedure. It is not used to transplant the kidney into the receiving patient.
The new procedure involves making a three-quarter inch incision in the interior of the bellybutton and inserting a tube-like port with several round entry points for inserting a camera and other tools into the belly.
The belly is inflated with carbon dioxide to provide manoeuvring room. The kidney is then freed from connecting tissue, wrapped in a plastic bag and removed through the navel when the blood supply is cut, shrinking the organ’s fist-like size.
The incision is expanded to about 3.2 cm to extract the kidney after the port is removed. — AP