For the first time in the world, a successful simultaneous transplant of the face and both hands of a patient who suffered from burns in a car accident was carried out. After six months, the grafts are functioning normally.
A face and hand transplant requires painstaking microsurgical work to suture blood vessels, nerves, tendons, muscles, and especially high precision during facial surgery. Until now, there have been only two attempts at simultaneous transplantation of a face and both hands in the world. One of them - in France - ended in failure: the patient died of complications. As a result of the second, conducted in the USA, the face was engrafted, and the hands (due to the reaction of rejection) had to be amputated.
A third such operation was performed at the New York University Medical Center, and it was successful. The patient was a pharmaceutical lab technician who fell asleep while driving after a night shift. An accident occurred in which the driver received 80 percent of the burns on the surface of the body.
Preparations for transplantation began at the beginning of 2019. With great difficulty, a suitable donor was found. As a result, both hands were amputated to the middle of the forearm, replacing them with donor ones, and all skin and cartilage from the hairline to the neck, fragments of the zygomatic arches, the bones of the nose and the lower jaw with adjacent muscles, nerves and blood vessels were transplanted onto the face.
140 health workers participated in the treatment of the patient. Then his long-term rehabilitation began. After six months, the man was able to blink, raise his eyebrows, frown, eat on his own, dress, play with the dog, train with a twenty-kilogram load. To avoid tissue rejection, he will have to take immunosuppressants all his life. According to the surgeons, the chances of success in this case were small, but the results exceeded all doctors' expectations.
