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Face transplant doctors worried
19/01/2006 14:40 - (SA)
Tucson - The world's first face transplant recipient is using her new lips to take up smoking again, which doctors fear could interfere with her healing and raise the risk of tissue rejection.
Dr Jean-Michel Dubernard, who led the team that performed the pioneering transplant in France on November 27, said: "It is a problem."
The woman's French surgeons made their first scientific presentation on the partial face transplant at a medical conference this week.
The news about her smoking came even as American surgeons said that they were growing more comfortable with the French doctors' decision to try the operation and that they hoped to offer such transplants to more patients.
Tissue-rejection episode
The 38-year-old Frenchwoman received a new nose, chin and lips from a brain-dead donor after being mauled by her dog last spring. The woman had been identified only as Isabelle because of French privacy laws.
The doctors said the woman suffered a tissue-rejection episode last month, but was now doing well.
However, they said she had resumed smoking, which besides being bad in general for health, was especially a problem after surgery because it impaired circulation to tissues and could raise the risk of rejection.
Some doctors had questioned the woman's psychological fitness for the operation because of reports that she had taken sleeping pills in a possible suicide attempt after the dog attack took place - an allegation Dubernard repeatedly had denied.
French operation 'ethical'
He said she received extensive psychiatric evaluation and counselling before the operation.
American doctors at the conference said it was time to stop debating whether the French operation was ethical or wise and focus now on making such transplants as safe and widely available as possible.
Dr Warren Breidenbach, the surgeon who did the first hand transplant in the United States, at Jewish Hospital in Louisville in 1999 said: "Face transplants can be done and should be done."
Another Louisville transplant expert, Dr Suzanne Ildstad, said: "A number of us here are interested in making this a widespread procedure available to the public. It's the future, and could benefit millions of people."
Medical conference
Problems with other novel types of transplants surfaced at the medical conference.
Doctors had been encouraged that success rates were roughly 90% among the 24 hand transplants performed to date, but a Chinese surgeon surprised the conference by reporting that up to half of the nine or so patients in his country had since rejected the new organs because they couldn't afford immune-suppressing drugs.
Dr Guoxian Pei, chief of orthopaedics at Nanfang Hospital at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China said one patient even asked to have the new hand amputated after the one-year period during which the hospital provided free medication ended.
- AP
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