A team of surgeons has carried out the world’s first full-face transplant on a young Spanish farmer unable to breathe or eat on his own since accidentally shooting himself in the face five years ago.
It was the most extensive operation yet and the 11th known face transplant worldwide.
During the 24-hour surgery, doctors lifted an entire face, including jaw, nose, cheekbones, muscles, teeth and eyelids, and placed it masklike onto the man, Joan Pere Barret said on Friday.
Transplant experts hailed the surgery, carried out late last month at Barcelona’s Vall d’Hebron Hospital, as a significant advance.
“It is a breakthrough. They are pushing the envelope and I am very happy for them,” said Thomas Romo, chief of facial and reconstructive surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York.
The Spanish patient, who was not identified, now has a completely new face from his hairline down and only one visible scar, which looks like a wrinkle running across his neck, said Barret, who headed the 30-member surgical team.
The man cannot yet speak, eat or smile, but he can see and swallow saliva, the surgeon said. He is expected to be able to eat and breathe on his own in about a week.
“If you look him in the face, you see a normal person,” Barret said. “He sits up, he walks in his hospital room and he watches television.”
Before the transplant, the 30-year-old patient had had nine surgeries and could only breathe with the help of a ventilator and get nourishment from a feeding tube. He also had problems speaking.
The 2005 accident, in which he shot himself with a shotgun, essentially destroyed his face from the eye sockets down, although his eyes and eyesight were unaffected.
During the daylong operation, Barret said his team cut off the donor’s face below the eye sockets and attached the bone structure along with muscles and nerves to the recipient “in one piece.”
“Imagine a skull. It is as if with a saw, we cut everything just below the upper part of the eye sockets, as if we were sawing all that,” he said. Then, “everything attached to the mask is placed on the recipient.”
“It is a little bit like the movie with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage,” the surgeon said, referring to the 1997 thriller Face/Off, in which the face of the character played by Cage is grafted onto the Travolta character’s skull in an identity switch.
Face transplants in the real world have gained acceptance since the first partial transplant almost five years ago in France.
Patients don’t look like the dead people whose skin and facial features they now live with. And skeptical bioethicists and doctors groups have warmed to the idea for patients who have tried reconstructive surgery with little success.
There have been 10 partial transplants worldwide, including in the US, China and elsewhere in Spain, but this is the first full face transplant, Barret said.
The Spanish operation is similar to a near-total face transplant carried out by a team led by Maria Siemionow in 2008 in Cleveland, on a woman who was also shot in the face.
But the Spanish case “seems to us to be more complex,” said Neil Huband, a spokesman for the UK Facial Transplantation Research Team, based at the Royal Free Hospital in London.
Barret would give no details about the donor except to say that doctors try to choose donors of similar weight, height, facial measurements and skin tone as the recipient.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS