Treatment for children in India

Why we keep saying "early"

With adults, waiting a few months usually changes the cost of treatment. With children it can change whether treatment is possible at all, and that difference is the single most important thing on this page.

A hole between the heart's chambers left untreated raises the pressure in the lungs, and past a certain point that pressure becomes fixed and the defect can no longer be safely closed. Childhood cancers are often fast-growing, which cuts both ways: they respond dramatically well to treatment, and they punish delay. A liver condition in an infant can move from correctable to requiring transplant within months.

None of that is a reason to panic, and it is not a sales line. It is a reason to send the reports now and find out where you actually stand, even if you are nowhere near deciding about travel. An early opinion costs nothing and occasionally changes everything.

Congenital heart defects

Children born with a heart defect are the largest group we see. The common ones are all correctable, usually with a single operation, and Indian paediatric cardiac units perform them in high volume by surgeons who operate only on children.

• ASD, a hole between the two upper chambers. Closed surgically or, in suitable cases, with a device passed up through a vein.
• VSD, a hole between the two lower chambers. The commonest defect; small ones sometimes close on their own, larger ones need repair.
• PDA, a blood vessel that should close shortly after birth and does not. Often closed without open surgery, with the shortest stay of any of these.
• Tetralogy of Fallot, a combination of four abnormalities that causes the blueness parents notice. Corrected with one operation, and the results after repair are good.

Full detail, including the adult procedures, is on heart treatment in India.

Childhood cancer

Cancer in children is different from cancer in adults, in a way that is worth understanding because it is genuinely hopeful. Childhood cancers are typically more sensitive to chemotherapy, and many are curable at rates far higher than adult cancers of the same organ. Leukaemia in particular, which is the commonest childhood cancer, has outcomes that would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

Treatment is usually long, often months to a couple of years of protocol-driven chemotherapy rather than a single operation, and that has real implications for a family travelling: it is a relocation rather than a trip, and it needs planning as one. Where a bone marrow transplant is needed, a sibling is frequently the donor.

Radiation in children is approached with particular care because growing tissue is more vulnerable, which is where proton therapy has its strongest argument: it spares surrounding tissue in a way that matters more over a child's remaining lifetime than it does in an adult.

Thalassaemia and sickle cell

Both are inherited blood disorders, both are common across our markets, and both have the same potentially curative treatment: a bone marrow transplant, most successfully performed in childhood with a matched sibling donor.

This is one of the clearest cases in medicine where a child's age at treatment changes the outcome. Transplant before repeated transfusions have caused iron overload and organ damage is substantially more successful than transplant later. If you have a child with thalassaemia major or sickle cell disease and a healthy sibling, having the sibling tissue-typed is worth doing now rather than at some future point. See sickle cell disease and bone marrow transplant.

Paediatric liver and kidney transplant

Biliary atresia and inherited metabolic conditions are the usual reasons a child needs a liver transplant, and a parent is very often the donor. Paediatric liver transplant is quoted on the partner list in rupees, at INR 18.5 to 20 lakh.

The donor law that governs all transplants for foreign nationals applies here too, and it is the thing to understand before anything else. See organ transplant in India.

Travelling as a family

Practical points that are easy to get wrong and expensive to fix late:

• The child travels on a medical visa; both parents can travel on medical attendant visas. Apply for the whole family together rather than sequentially. See our medical visa guide.
• Bring the vaccination record and the full birth and growth history, not just the recent scans.
• For long treatments, ask about accommodation near the hospital and about schooling or play facilities. Months in a hotel room with a sick child is harder than families anticipate.
• Ask whether an interpreter is available. Explaining a child's symptoms in a second language, under stress, is where important detail gets lost.
• Ask what the plan is for follow-up once you are home, and get the treatment summary in writing before you leave.

Related

• Heart treatment in India
• Sickle cell disease treatment in India
• Bone marrow transplant in India
• Liver transplant in India
• Medical visa for India