At Johns Hopkins Research University in Baltimore, surgeons are planning to conduct an experimental male genital organ transplant on 60 injured military personnel, according to philly.com. According to doctors, this will restore urinary and sexual function in the military.
According to Taylor Graham, a spokesman for the medical facility, the penis transplant is intended only for military personnel who received urogenital injuries during the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.
According to doctors, genital transplant surgery is especially important for young men.
- Servicemen, having been injured, first of all feel themselves to make sure that their male genitals are in place. The last thing they care about is whether they've lost a leg or an arm, says Graham.
The doctors are planning to start the first operations in the near future.
“ The technical and ethical issues for a male genital organ transplant are similar to those for a face and hand transplant, ” said Scott Levine, a surgeon at the University of Pennsylvania who led the world's first hand and forearm transplant to a child in the nursery last year. hospital in Philadelphia.
A penile transplant can take about 12 hours and involves connecting major nerves, blood vessels, and small muscles.
Promotional video:
Bioethics professor Arthur Kaplan from New York University believes that such a transplant is unsafe for the patient, as it requires taking drugs that will seriously affect the health of men in the future.
- We are not worried when it comes to heart transplants. You cannot do without transplantation, otherwise the person will die. But, if a penis is transplanted to a young 20-year-old guy, by the age of 30 his kidneys may fail. Is this a success? - said Kaplan.
He also noted that the prospects for a face or genital transplant are likely to be small.
“It’s unlikely that many would agree to donate externally visible organs,” Kaplan added.
The first male genital organ transplant was performed in 2006 in China. Local doctors transplanted the genitals of a 20-year-old man into a 44-year-old man, who was diagnosed as having brain death as a result of an accident.
The operation lasted 15 hours. Analyzes showed that the donor penis is well supplied with blood, and after 10 days the patient relieved himself without the help of a catheter.
However, doctors admit that the donor organ was removed two weeks after the transplant due to "serious psychological problems of the recipient with his wife."
In 2014, in South Africa, a similar operation was completed successfully. Doctors transplanted a penis to a 21-year-old young man who lost it as a result of an unsuccessful circumcision, which is a traditional ceremony for marking puberty in men in parts of South Africa.
The Cape Town specialists who performed the operation noted that the transplanted penis was "fully functional."