Polish surgeons from the University Hospital of Wrocław (Uniwersytet Medyczny we Wrocławiu) spoke about the world's first successful limb transplant for a person who was born without it.
A patient named Peter is 32 years old and has lived without an arm since birth. He received a limb from a deceased donor.
“This is the first upper limb transplant in the world that has been successfully implanted in a person with a congenital defect of this type,” commented the head of the group of surgeons Adam Domanasiewicz.
The operation lasted a total of 13 hours. During this time, doctors amputated the donor arm, attached it to the patient's body, fastened the bones with titanium pins, and then sutured the main muscles, tendons and blood vessels.
As the blood circulation in the donor arm is restored, the remaining tissues will also have to grow together, the surgeons specify.
Be that as it may, the first positive results are already there: a week after the operation, Peter was able to move the fingers of the transplanted hand - bend the thumb normally and, to a lesser extent, the rest.
The patient is expected to have two difficulties in mastering a new hand. “The limb to which we sewed the brush was underdeveloped. There were not enough blood vessels, nerves, muscles were weak. The second problem was that the brain might not understand how to control the new hand,”explained Domanasevich.
Promotional video:
In his opinion, the success of the operation can be judged in six months: if the patient is able to control the hand at least at the same level at which the prosthesis provides, then it will be possible to talk about the complete success of transplantation and other similar operations.
At the same time, the very fact of such a transplant cannot be underestimated. “This is an important breakthrough in neurophysiology and in the practice of transplantation, because until now it was believed that such transplants would not help in the case of birth defects,” Domanasevich noted.
Recall that before that, the hands were transplanted only to patients who had lost them as a result of accidents (that is, the brain remembered how to control a limb). As for the congenital absence of limbs, such transplants were performed only on newborn Siamese twins in Indonesia and Canada. Until now, adults with similar birth defects have not received transplants: doctors considered it simply impossible.
According to the surgeons, success in the case of Peter will give hope to many people born without any limb. The patient himself, meanwhile, told reporters that the first thing he would do was to hug his family with both arms.
Yulia Vorobyova