Maltese Patient Undergoes ISMETT’s 400th Pancreatectomy

ISMETT increasingly becoming a reference point in the Mediterranean for hepato-bilio-pancreatic surgery
ISMETT, Istituto Mediterraneo per i Trapianti e Terapie ad Alta Specializzazione in Palermo is  increasingly becoming a health care center of reference in the Mediterranean. The 400th pancreatectomy was recently performed at ISMETT. The patient was a 38-year-old woman from Malta who had been diagnosed with a pancreas body tumor of 5 cm, with portal vein infiltration. For this reason, her doctors in Malta referred her, as in several other cases over the past year, to ISMETT’s Abdominal Surgery and Organ Transplantation Unit.

“The surgical procedure consisted in a total pancreatectomy, with the replacement of the portal vein and the superior mesenteric vein through the interposition of a venous segment procured from an organ donor with a compatible blood type,” said Salvatore Gruttadauria, MD, Head of ISMETT’s Abdominal Surgery and Organ Transplantation Unit. “The patient was discharged ten days after surgery; she is well now and continuing her rehabilitation.”

Four hundred pancreatic resections, over 1,050 liver resections, and almost 1,100 liver transplants are just some of the numbers of ISMETT’s abdominal surgery activity. ISMETT has now become a center of reference for abdominal surgery in the Mediterranean Basin. Last year, ISMETT treated patients from Serbia, Cyprus, Malta, as well as other Italian regions, with 2% of surgical procedures performed on non-Sicilian patients. The high level of quality and excellence of the results achieved by ISMETT was certified in 2016 by AGENAS, the Italian National Agency for Regional Health Care Services.