A 32-year-old woman, who received a uterus from an unknown dead donor, safely carried and gave birth to a baby.
This is the first case in the world and doctors say that the precedent can be a real salvation for infertile women.
A healthy girl was born a year ago, but all this time the sensational fact of her birth was kept secret. Now the baby is a year old and it is already clear that everything is really all right with her.
The news was published in the medical journal The Lancet.
The mother's name and surname were not disclosed, and there are no photographs of the one-year-old girl, only photos taken immediately after birth.
In 2016, at a hospital at the University of São Paulo (Brazil), an operation was performed to implant a uterus from a dead donor into the body of a woman who was born without a uterus at all. The uterus belonged to a 45-year-old woman who died of a stroke.
The operation lasted 11 hours and was also advanced. After that, the patient spent two days in intensive care, and after that she took special medications to prevent organ rejection.
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After some time, when the uterus took root, the woman first went on her period, which quickly tuned in to the cycle. And 7 months later, the woman finally decided to get pregnant. She had IVF safely done using her own eggs.
The pregnancy was uneventful and the baby was born 35 weeks later by caesarean section. Its parameters were no different from the average for newborns.
After a caesarean section, doctors removed the transplanted uterus. According to doctors, so far technologies allow the donor uterus to be implanted only for a certain time.
Earlier in the world, attempts were made to transplant a uterus from a living donor. The first living donor transplant was undertaken in Saudi Arabia in 2000, but there were no live births until 2012 in Sweden. Over the past few years, 9 such children have been born in Sweden.
Two more such babies - including one earlier this year - were born in Dallas, Texas. The third was announced in Serbia last year.
In total, there were 39 attempts to transplant uterus from living donors, but the procedures performed in Lebanon, the Czech Republic, Germany and China have not yet led to pregnancy.
Uterus transplants from dead donors have been performed only 11 times - in Turkey, Ohio and Texas in the USA, Czech Republic and Brazil. But they were unsuccessful.