Face transplant

A face transplant is a medical procedure to replace all or part of a person's face using tissue from a donor. The world's first partial face transplant on a living human was carried out in France in 2005. The world's first full face transplant was completed in Spain in 2010. Turkey, France, the United States and Spain (in order of total number of successful face transplants performed) are considered the leading countries in the research into the procedure. People with faces disfigured by trauma, burns, disease, or birth defects might aesthetically benefit from the procedure. Professor Peter Butler at the Royal Free Hospital first suggested this approach in treating people with facial disfigurement in a Lancet article in 2002. This suggestion caused considerable debate at the time concerning the ethics of this procedure. An alternative to a face transplant is facial reconstruction, which typically involves moving the patient's own skin from their back, buttocks, thighs, or chest to their face in a series of as many as 50 operations to regain even limited functionality, and a face that is often likened to a mask or a living quilt. The world's first full-face replant operation was on 9-year-old Sandeep Kaur, whose face was ripped off when her hair was caught in a thresher. Sandeep's mother witnessed the accident. Sandeep arrived at the hospital unconscious with her face in two pieces in a plastic bag. An article in The Guardian recounts: 'In 1994, a nine-year-old child in northern India lost her face and scalp in a threshing machine accident. Her parents raced to the hospital with her face in a plastic bag and a surgeon managed to reconnect the arteries and replant the skin.' The operation was successful, although the child was left with some muscle damage as well as scarring around the perimeter where the facial skin was sutured back on. Sandeep's doctor was Abraham Thomas, one of India's top microsurgeons. In 2004, Sandeep was training to be a nurse. In 1996, a similar operation was performed in the Australian state of Victoria, when a woman's face and scalp, torn off in a similar accident, was packed in ice and successfully reattached. The world's first partial face transplant on a living human was carried out on 27 November 2005 by Bernard Devauchelle, an oral and maxillofacial surgeon, Benoit Lengelé, a Belgian plastic surgeon, and Jean-Michel Dubernard in Amiens, France. Isabelle Dinoire underwent surgery to replace her original face, which had been mauled by her dog. A triangle of face tissue from a brain-dead woman's nose and mouth was grafted onto the patient. On 13 December 2007, the first detailed report of the progress of this transplant after 18 months was released in the New England Journal of Medicine and documents that the patient was happy with the results but also that the journey has been very difficult, especially with respect to her immune system's response. Dinoire died on April 22, 2016 at the age of 49 following cancer from medications. A 29-year-old French man underwent surgery in 2007. He had a facial tumor called a neurofibroma caused by a genetic disorder. The tumor was so massive that the man could not eat or speak properly. In March 2008, the treatment of 30-year-old Pascal Coler of France, who has neurofibromatosis, ended after he received what his doctors call the world's first successful almost full face transplant. The operation, which lasted approximately 20 hours, was designed and performed by Laurent Lantieri and his team (Jean Paul Meningaud, Antonios Paraskevas and Fabio Ingallina).