The health condition of popular playback singer S P Balasubrahmanyam, who has been admitted to hospital since August 5, suddenly deteriorated and is in an extremely critical condition.

A medical bulletin from MGM Healthcare, released at 6.30 pm on Thursday said that the singer was on maximal life support and that a team of experts were closely monitoring his health condition. He remained on ECMO and other life support systems, the bulletin said.

The news of Balasubrahmanyam’s health condition suddenly taking a turn for the worse prompted his fans to post ‘get well’ messages and asking for people to pray for his health.

Earlier, when the hospital had said that he was critical, the film music industry had organized a joint prayer for his speedy recovery. Subsequently his condition became stable though he remained in life support.

The health condition of the singer, who was admitted to the hospital with mild symptoms deteriorated for the first time on August 13 late night and he was put on life support and moved to the Intensive Care Unit.

On August 19, he was put on ECMO besides ventilator and a day after, when he remained critical, people from all walks of life, including celebrities and the general public, came together to pray for his early recovery and his condition stabilised soon.

Towards the end of last month, he underwent passive physiotherapy and later “actively participated in physiotherapy” and he was fully awake and responsive during that phase.

A multi-disciplinary team, comprising specialists from internal medicine, pulmonology and infectious diseases among others, took care of him.

Also, the team actively collaborated with international experts from reputed centres in the United States and the United Kingdom that saw a slew of COVID-19 patients requiring ECMO support.

On September 3, the hospital had said that he was stable, conscious, responsive and continued to show clinical progress and days later it said his condition warranted an extended stay in the ICU requiring ECMO and ventilator support.

Balasubrahmanyam, who has to his credit over 40,000 songs, has sung in languages including Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Hindi.

During admission, he had symptoms of cold and intermittent fever for a couple of days and had even posted a video in which he sounded confident.

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