Huge team of New York surgeons have declared the most extensive face transplant ever a success. According to the dean of the Langone Medical School Robert Grossman the procedure that gave a firefighter the face of a brain-dead patient (who suffered a fatal bike incident) stands as a “historic” achievement.
A face transplant is an extremely dangerous medical procedure that replaces all or part of a person's face (usually after burns, disfigurement or other serious medical condition) using tissue from a donor or cadaver. The world's first partial face transplant on a living human was carried out in France in 2005.
The current operation took place in August this year. Extensive team of surgeons at New York University’s Langone Medical Center performed the transplant for 41-year-old Patrick Hardison, a retired fireman from Mississippi. In 2001 he suffered serious disfiguring injuries when a burning roof collapsed on him during his duties.
Ninety-three days after the transplant lead surgeon Eduardo Rodriguez said that Hardison’s body had not yet rejected the face, making him confident that the extreme procedure could be described as a success. A trained medical team of more than 100 people has been working in a course of 26 hours, divided in two groups. The team needed to find a donor matching blood type, height, weight, skin tone, hair color and most certainly no antibodies that would cause rejection of tissue right away.
The patient will have to take medication to suppress his immune system for the rest of his life. Doctors believe in six months Hardison would not only be able to eat normal food but his speech would improve and the intense swelling should diminish dramatically.
According to Wikipedia, world's first full face transplant was completed in Spain in 2010. Today Turkey, France, the US and Spain (in order of total number of successful face transplants performed) are considered the leading countries in face transplant in the world.
Posted by : mediKa.bg
