Cleveland Clinic to Attempt Face Transplants

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MrsSpringsteen

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so should this be attempted?

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/09/18/D8CMKA2G7.html

"Your face will be removed and replaced with one donated from a cadaver, matched for tissue type, age, sex and skin color. Surgery should last 8 to 10 hours; the hospital stay, 10 to 14 days.

Complications could include infections that turn your new face black and require a second transplant or reconstruction with skin grafts. Drugs to prevent rejection will be needed lifelong, and they raise the risk of kidney damage and cancer.

After the transplant you might feel remorse, disappointment, or grief or guilt toward the donor. The clinic will try to shield your identity, but the press likely will discover it.

The clinic will cover costs for the first patient; nothing about others has been decided.

Another form tells donor families that the person receiving the face will not resemble their dead loved one. The recipient should look similar to how he or she did before the injury because the new skin goes on existing bone and muscle, which give a face its shape.

All of the little things that make up facial expression mannerisms like winking when telling a joke or blushing at a compliment are hard-wired into the brain and personality, not embedded in the skin."
 
Wow.

What are the circumstances of the recipient? I can see it in some cases. Burn victims, accident victims. A little ghoulish maybe, but no different from other organs, really.
 
they had face transplants as a storyline recently on Nip/Tuck

Partial Face Transplant Done in France

By CAROLE BIANCHI, Associated Press Writer

Doctors have performed the world's first partial face transplant, grafting a nose, lips and chin onto a 38-year-old woman disfigured by a dog bite, hospital officials said Wednesday.

The surgery was performed Sunday, said a statement from medics at hospitals in Lyon and Amiens. The surgery was performed in Amiens in northern France, but doctors from both hospitals participated.

One of the doctors who performed the surgery, Jean-Michel Dubernard, would not discuss the case when contacted by The Associated Press.

"We still don't know when the patient will get out," he said.

A news conference is planned for Friday.

The hospitals' statement said the woman was in "excellent" condition, and the transplanted organs looked "normal." She wants to remain anonymous, the statement added.

The woman was disfigured by a dog bite in May, and the injury made it difficult for her to speak and chew, the statement said. Such injuries are "extremely difficult, if not impossible" to repair using normal surgical techniques, it added.

The organs were taken from a donor who was brain dead, with the family's consent, the statement said.

Experts say the mouth and nose are the most difficult parts of the face to transplant.

Doctors elsewhere have performed scalp and ear transplants.

Dubernard collaborated in the transplant with Bernard Devauchelle.

Dubernard also led teams that performed a forearm transplant on a 49-year-old New Zealander in September 1998 and the first double arm transplant in January 2000 on Denis Chatelier, who lost both forearms when a model rocket he was trying to launch exploded.

Scientists around the world are working to perfect the technique involved in transplanting faces. Today's best treatments still leave many people with freakish, scar-tissue masks that don't look or move like natural skin.

A complete face transplant, which involves applying a sheet of skin in one operation, has never been done before. The procedure is complex but would use standard surgical techniques.

Critics say the surgery is too risky for something that is not a matter of life or death, as regular organ transplants are.

The main worry is that if the immune system rejects the transplant, the skin will slough off, leaving the patient worse off than before. Complications also could include infections that turn the new face black and require a second transplant or reconstruction with skin grafts.

Drugs to prevent rejection would be needed lifelong, and they raise the risk of kidney damage and cancer.

Such concerns have delayed plans to attempt the operation in England.

In France, ethics authorities rejected an application by doctors to try the surgery last year but left the door open for partial transplants around the mouth and nose.

In the United States, the Cleveland Clinic is among those planning to try a face transplant.

Dr. Maria Siemionow, a surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, said the French do not appear to have tried conventional reconstruction with skin grafts before doing the risky and radical partial face transplant, raising ethical concerns about subjecting a patient to the risks of immune suppression without first exhausting normal remedies.

At least one other partial transplant has been published — Korean doctors who gave the scalp and ears of a young man to an elderly woman disfigured by the skin cancer melanoma. The outcome of that case is not known.
 
We had some relatively lengthy news story on this dog attack woman last night, because some skip doctor who advised the team doing this lady had done a hand transplant...anyway, the woman will look 60% like the new face and 40% like her old. As strange as it was to grasp, the natural vanity we all feel is something difficult to overcome after something like a dog attack or burns or something.
 
Angela Harlem said:

the woman will look 60% like the new face and 40% like her old.

I know it was a partial

mouth, chin, nose

that may be the 60%


a whole face transplant will not look like the donor

the shape of the head, the muscles, bone structure affect what the face will look like

the donated face is pliable skin that will conform to where it is placed

the patient will not look like her old self of course
 
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