Hospital Clinic of Barcelona has been successfully applied in 32 cases of minimally invasive surgery pioneer in the world to extract live donor kidneys through the vagina, while the U.S. has imported another technique to do so by navel in men.

Antonio Alcaraz, head of the department of urology at the Clinic, said yesterday that these experiments confirm the feasibility of surgery through natural orifices, known as NOTES and used until now to remove tumor-organs in live kidney donation for transplantation .

This technique of transplant nephrectomy is an improvement on the usual laparoscopic surgery, and obviously over the conventional open surgery. And the two are hidden cuts made in the vaginal pouch, with minimal postoperative pain, reduced hospital stay of 2 or 3 days without sequelae in the sexual and reproductive activity of women.

"The results are small scars that no one would say that this woman has donated an organ to her son or her husband"

Thus avoiding the larger scars of laparoscopic procedures.

To cater to male donors, the clinic has been imported from the United States cited nefrectromía technique of single port, which allows to perform a live kidney donation through the navel, a procedure that leaves a small scar about four inches that is almost half-hidden under the navel.

Two days ago, was performed in the Clinical transumbilical the fifth operation to remove a kidney. One of the main objectives of this new system is that the donor organ receives blood supply as long as possible.

A team consisting of members from the area of ​​urology and uro-oncology Clinic, Clinical Institute of Nephrology and Urology and renal transplantation surgery unit began this series of interventions in 2009, adapting the technique for removal of kidney tumors.

Alcaraz notes that women tend to be more altruistic, since two thirds of living kidney donors are female, and the receiver is usually a family member, usually a son or husband, although there have been cases of donation between siblings.

The success of these operations as reflected yesterday Concepción Giménez, a woman who wanted her husband, Antonio Gonzales, had to undergo dialysis and was not afraid to learn that he would be subjected to a pioneering technique, the results have been published in the journal "European Urology".

"He was the father of my children I did not want to lose pay and I said it all, the bull"

He joked that Granada 69, who, also with a smile, recalled the simple postoperatively. "I took a paracetamol and then threw me right away, do not know if the cuts or why."

Concepción Giménez stressed that she was especially glad to have "liberated" their children from having to donate a kidney to his father, "because they were willing to take this step."