French surgeons have performed what they said on Wednesday was the world's first partial face transplant— giving a new nose, chin and lips to a woman attacked by a dog.
Specialists from two French hospitals carried out the operation on a 38-year-old woman on Sunday in the northern city of Amiens by taking the face from a brain—dead woman, who had hanged herself just hours before the operation. Her family agreed on the operation.
“The patient is in an excellent state and the transplant looks normal,” the hospitals said in a brief statement after waiting three days to announce the pioneering surgery.
The woman had been left without a nose and lips after the dog attacked her last May, and was unable to talk or chew properly. Such injuries are “extremely difficult, if not impossible” to repair using normal surgical techniques, the statement said.
The statement did not say what the woman would look like when she had fully recovered, but medical experts said she was unlikely to resemble the woman who had been the source of her new face.
The operation was led by Jean—Michel Dubernard, a specialist from a hospital in Lyon who has also carried out hand transplants.
Skin transplants have long been used to treat burns and other injuries, but operations around the mouth and nose have been considered very difficult because of the area's high sensitivity to foreign tissue.
Teams in France, the United States and Britain had been developing techniques to make face transplants a reality.
There was a short—term risk for the patient if blood vessels became blocked, a medium—term danger of her body rejecting the new skin and a long—term possibility that the drugs used could cause cancers.
Experts say that although such medical advances should be celebrated, the transplant had thrown up moral（道德的）and ethical(伦理的) issues. Little is known about the psychological effect of the transplant.
