Chennai's Siddharth has become the country's youngest patient to successfully undergo a complete liver transplant. Doctors at Delhi's Sir Gangaram Hospital, who conducted the operation on 11-month-old Siddharth, say he beat the earlier record held by Pakistani national Shreyar. A resident of Karachi, Shreyar was one-year-old when he underwent the liver transplant in 2006 in the same hospital. While Shreyar survived after a portion of his grandmother's liver was transplanted into him, Siddharth's saviour came in the form of his aunt, Saroja, who donated the left lateral part of her liver. Siddharth was born with a rare condition called Biliary Atresia in which the common bile duct between the liver and the small intestine is blocked or absent. The bile is, therefore, trapped within the liver cells rapidly causing cirrhosis. If not corrected early, the condition results in liver failure and death. Siddharth was diagnosed with Biliary Atresia, when he was five months old. According to doctors, he suffered from jaundice, a typical manifestation of Biliary Atresia, when he was just two days old. However, doctors in Chennai then failed to diagnose the condition. After five months, when Siddharth's jaundice level persisted and continued to be high, doctors decided to conduct the Kasai procedure and create an open duct so that the bile could drain from the liver. During the operation, doctors found that his liver had already become cirrhotic and his only hope for survival lay in a liver transplant. Dr Neelam Mohan, consultant paediatric hepatologist and physician in charge of paediatric liver transplantation at SRGH, told TOI that Siddharth was brought to the hospital on January 23 with severe liver dysfunction. "He had high jaundice causing his abdomen to become abnormally big. He could hardly breathe with severe chest infection like hyper-reactive airway disease, blood infection and pneumonia. He was also suffering from gastrointestinal bleeding. For over two weeks, he was on oxygen and high level of intensive medical and nutritional care was administered. We kept him in the ICU to stabilize his condition and prepare him for the transplant,' Dr Mohan said. The transplant was successfully conducted on February 15 by a team of surgeons including Dr A S Soin, Dr Vinay Kumaran and Dr Rahul Kakodkar. Dr Soin said: "The transplant operation was challenging and complicated. The main blood supply, the portal vein in the child's liver, was irreparably blocked due to the late stage of his disease. A graft was then used between the donor's liver and the patient's portal vein. Siddharth was discharged after three weeks.' Speaking about why Siddharth's aunt donated the liver and not his parents, Dr Mohan said: "Siddharth's mother, Suganthee, had a fatty liver and her blood group was