NEW DELHI, April 10 (UPI) -- An Indian medical school study has determined one donor cornea can be divided and transplanted into multiple patients with eye disease or eye damage.
Recent advances have allowed ophthalmologic surgeons to move from transplanting the entire cornea in every patient to more focused operations that involve removing and replacing only the diseased or damaged portion of the cornea.
Such surgical techniques provide an opportunity to make use of a single donor cornea in more than one patient.
In the study, Rasik Vajpayee -- then of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and now at the University of Melbourne -- used a cornea from a man who died of cardiac arrest for transplants in three patients. The corneal tissue was divided into three parts, each part was then transplanted into different patients.
The procedures were performed on the same day and were all successful.
The scientists said the use of a single donor cornea in more than one patient might become standard surgical practice, helping reduce the backlog of patients with corneal blindness in countries in which there is a dearth of good-quality donor corneal tissue.
The research appears in the April issue of the journal Archives of Ophthalmology.
