Hyderabad, Sep : Dr Jnanesh Thacker Surgical Director of Heart, Lung and Heart-Lung Transplantation at Yashoda Hospitals Secunderabad, achieved a rare and significant milestone of performing more than 500 Heart and Lung transplants all over the world.

This is one of the best outcomes ( which can be independently verified in the international registry of Heart and Lung transplantation), a hospital release here said on Wednesday.

He was an accomplished Cardiothoracic surgeon before going to the USA for training and subsequently practicing among the top centers in the world in the then pioneering work in Heart and lung transplantation including Austria, UPMC, Pittsburg , Temple University Philadelphia among others where he was instrumental in performing hundreds of such transplants.

He has even featured on the cover page of Temple’s CAPSULE magazine for performing more than 70 transplants in just 3 months. He was also active academically publishing numerous papers and training fellows and post graduates.

Since then despite multiple offers to continue in the USA he relocated back to India to pioneer the Heart and Lung transplantation program in India. He was the first to perform a successful Lung Transplantation for an Indian patient in India .

Since then, among his other achievements he did the first lung transplantation in a teaching hospital and also the first minimally invasive double lung transplantation in India. Minimally invasive transplantation is highly demanding and technical but with decreased patient post operative stay and improved outcomes in the right hands

On this occasion Dr Pavan Gorukanti, Director Yashoda Hospitals said, Dr Thacker’s passion is to increase awareness of Heart and lung transplants in India which he feels is still at the beginning stages compared to other countries, and in particular with all the new advances in medical, immunosuppressive and surgical treatments long term survival with good quality of life becoming fairly routine, feels Heart and lung transplantation is poised for exponential growth in the country and aims to eventually do among the highest number of such transplants in the world from right here., the release added.(UNI)