Source: Time
The surgeries could ultimately allow thousands of women without a uterus to give birth in the future
Four American women have received womb transplants from living donors at Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas, TIME learned exclusively. This is the first time living-donor womb transplants have been performed in the United States.
The four surgeries took place between Sept. 14 and Sept. 22, and three of the womb transplants were removed after tests determined the organs were not receiving normal blood flow. One woman still has her transplanted uterus and has shown no signs of rejection so far.
Uterus transplants with live donors have a precedent for success. In Sweden, where the surgery was pioneered, five of nine womb transplant recipients have given birth to healthy babies and one woman is pregnant for the second time.
Dr. Giuliano Testa, the lead surgeon and surgical chief of abdominal transplantation at Baylor, acknowledges that these results so far, while disappointing, still show tremendous progress. “If you look at this from the science [perspective], it’s something we’ve learned a lot from, and we have a patient who is doing well,” he says. “This is the beginning of hopefully a great history for medicine. ”
All four of the women have a condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome and were born without a uterus. About one in 4,500 women in the U.S. are estimated to have MRKH. Baylor plans to perform a total of 10 womb transplants before the end of 2016. “You cannot discount the desire of a woman to have a normal pregnancy, bear her own child, and deliver,” says Testa. “This is part of human nature.”
Baylor says the women received their transplants from so-called altruistic donors, meaning the donor women are not related to the recipients and do not know who they are. The women who received the transplants are between ages 20 to 35, and the donors are between ages of 35 to 60. Around 50 women volunteered to donate their womb. “I am totally amazed by that,” says Testa. “They told us, ‘We had our chance to become mothers, and now we have this uterus and it’s not doing anything for us. We can put this uterus to use for people who really need it.’ That struck me as a physician. These women are phenomenal.” Baylor has not identified any of the women.
Categories: America, Health, The Muslim Times, USA