Medical first: Surgeons remove healthy kidney through vagina

William Atkins
Wednesday, 04 February 2009 06:50

Science - Biology

On February 2, 2009, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine announced that a team of their surgeons successfully removed a healthy kidney from a female donor through a tiny incision in the back of her vagina.


This historic procedure is believed to be the first-of-its-kind in the world.

According to the Johns Hopkins press release Hopkins transplant surgeons remove healthy kidney through donor’s vagina, the “minimally invasive organ removal could increase donations.”

According to the chief of the Johns Hopkins transplant division, Robert Montgomery, “The kidney was successfully removed and transplanted into the donor’s niece, and both patients are doing fine.”

The donor is a forty-eight-year-old woman from Lexington Park, Maryland, U.S.A. The three-and-one-half-hour operation was performed on January 29, 2009.

The surgical team—headed by Dr. Mohamad E. Allaf (assistant professor in the departments of Urology and Biomedical Engineering and director of minimally invasive and robotic surgery)—only needed three “pea-size” scars to remove the kidney through the vagina.

Under normal circumstances, surgeons cut a five-to-six inch incision in a patient’s abdomen when removing a healthy kidney.

This new procedure is part of a group of emerging surgical procedures called natural orifice translumenal endoscopic surgery (NOTES).

In NOTES, surgery is performed through such “natural” bodily orifices as the mouth, vagina, or anus.

Such surgeries are generally preferred over tradition surgeries because they are much less invasive and less risky (because the incision is made internally). Afterwards, the patient has less chance for infection and has fewer (sometimes no) external scars or marks.

For more information, please read the NOTES article on the joint website “Natural Orifice Surgery Consortium for Assessment and Research” (NOSCAR), provided by the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES) and American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE).

[Edited on 2/5/09, "evasive" to "invasive"]