SIGHTINGS


 
Amputee Gets Donor's
Arm & Hand in Surgical First
By Robert Marmoz
9-24-98
 
 
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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