Woman mauled by dog gets face transplant

FRENCH surgeons have performed the world's first partial face transplant - giving a new nose, chin and lips to a woman savaged by a dog.

Specialists from two French hospitals carried out the operation on a 38-year-old woman on Sunday in the northern city of Amiens by grafting on tissues, muscles, arteries and veins from a brain-dead woman.

'The patient is in an excellent state and the transplant looks normal,' the hospitals said in a brief statement after waiting a few days to announce the pioneering surgery.

The woman, who was not identified, had been left without a nose and lips after the dog attacked her last May, and was unable to talk or chew properly.

The statement did not say what the woman would look like when she had fully recovered, but medical experts said she was unlikely to resemble the donor.

The operation was led by Dr Jean-Michel Dubernard, a specialist from a hospital in Lyon who has also carried out hand transplants, and Dr Bernard Devauchelle from the Amiens hospital.

Mr Stephen Wigmore, chair of the British Transplantation Society's ethics committee, said teams in France, the United States and Britain had been developing techniques to make face transplants a reality.

Skin transplants have long been used to treat burns and other injuries, but operations around the mouth and nose have been considered very difficult because of the area's high sensitivity to foreign tissue.

Dr Iain Hutchins, a facial surgeon and head of the research charity Saving Faces - The Facial Surgery Research Foundation said that although such medical advances should be celebrated, the transplant had thrown up moral and ethical issues.

'This was a 'quality of life' operation rather than a life-saving operation and has many implications for the recipient's and donor's families,' he said.

There was a short-term risk for the patient if blood vessels became blocked, a medium-term danger of her body rejecting the donor tissue and a long-term possibility that the drugs used in the operation could cause cancers.

'She could be back to square one, without a face, needing further reconstruction operations,' he said.
- Wire services.

:ghostface

http://newpaper.asia1.com.sg/news/st...,98217,00.html

http://news.google.com/nwshp?tab=wn&...,00.html&hl=en

The surgery has been hailed a major step forward, but it raises several questions:

* Was the patient's condition so severe that it justifies a lifetime of immunosuppressive medication?

* What attempts, if any, were made to restore the woman's face short of a transplant?

* Given that facial structures were transplanted, how successful can the surgery be in terms of restoring function?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Yoga

http://newpaper.asia1.com.sg/news/story/0,4136,98217,00.html

http://news.google.com/nwshp?tab=wn&ned=us&ncl=http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1136737,00.html&hl=en[/url]

The surgery has been hailed a major step forward, but it raises several questions:

* Was the patient's condition so severe that it justifies a lifetime of immunosuppressive medication?

imo, yes. Many people take anti-immune response drugs for lesser things.

* What attempts, if any, were made to restore the woman's face short of a transplant?

I would think any attempt in this way would still result in her having to take anti-immune response drugs, anyway.

* Given that facial structures were transplanted, how successful can the surgery be in terms of restoring function?

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I can only hope this works. Many choices are made for quality of life rather than length of life, and this is one I would make for myself. This woman is pretty brave in taking this step......being the first one to have such a transplant: what is learned here will affect us all in the future.

I hope it works for her. I also hope they killed the dog.

Well, she's still not out of the woods; she may yet reject the "transplant", and there's also the fact of living the rest of her life in an immunosuppressed condition due to the drug regimen she must adhere to.

Pretty risky, if you ask me.

one more science fiction thing that become a reallty
tnx for the article.

Here's an update on the woman's condition:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/12/02...cnn_topstories

Read bout it..scary..man