- LYON, France (Reuters) - In a surgical first, an international team
of doctors sewed a donor's hand and arm on a man whose own arm had been
amputated 14 years ago, a French hospital announced on Thursday. The extremely
delicate operation, which took place on Wednesday at the Edouard Herriot
hospital in Lyon in central France, took 13-1/2 hours, hospital officials
said. The surgical breakthrough ``gives hope to millions of victims of
workplace and domestic accidents, survivors of war or land mines and individuals
born with hereditary deformities,'' Dr Jean-Michel Dubernard, who led the
team, told reporters. The graft was performed on 48-year-old New Zealand
businessman Clint Hallam, who had lost his hand in a circular saw accident
in 1984. ``He is in excellent shape,'' Dubernard said. ``A day after the
surgery, the grafted hand is warm and has taken on colour.'' Hallam told
doctors he was ``over the moon,'' Dubernard told French television LCI.
Hallam lives in Perth, Australia. Hospital officials said the donor was
a brain-dead patient. The medical team comprised experts in microsurgery,
orthopaedics and transplant surgery from France, Australia, Britain and
Italy. Led by Dubernard of Lyon and Earl Owen of Sydney, Australia, the
team also included Briton Nadey Hakim, Italian Marco Lanzetta, Australian
Hari Kapila and Frenchmen Xavier Martin, Guillaume Herzberg and Marwan
Dawahra. The arm had been severed from the donor at the elbow. The procedure
initially involved attaching the bone of the donated hand and forearm to
Hallam's forearm. Afterwards doctors painstakingly sutured together the
blood vessels, nerves, tendons, muscles and skin. Doctors said the technical
skills required to carry out the procedure have been in place for years.
But the operation had never before been tried because of the danger the
body would reject the graft. They said new drugs have recently become available
that are better able to control the body's immune system which rejects
foreign cells. But the doctors cautioned that it will take 12 to 18 months
to determine to whether the operation has been a success. If all goes well,
that is the amount of time it will take for the nerve regeneration to reach
the ends of the fingers, they said.
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