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Baby Is First to Be Born in US After Uterus Transplant, Hospital Says

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A baby born at a Texas hospital is the first in the US to be birthed from a mother who had received a uterus transplant, according to the Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas.

The hospital has not revealed many details surrounding the birth, including when the baby boy was born. The patient and her family have also asked for privacy at this time, according to the hospital.

Giuliano Testa, the principal investigator of the uterine transplant clinical trial at the hospital called the birth a “milestone” and “a beautiful moment of love and hope for a mother who had been told she would never be able to carry her own child,” in a statement.

The transplant was carried out as part of a clinical trial to study new infertility treatment options for women who don’t have a functioning uterus. This could be because the women were born without the organ, lost the uterus or has one that no longer functions. (Read more from “Baby Is First to Be Born in US After Uterus Transplant, Hospital Says” HERE)

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14-Year-Old Receives First 3-D Printed Nose in US

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Reconstructive surgery on the human nose isn’t uncommon, but until now, doctors in the United States haven’t been able to replicate and restore the body part to its full functionality. Dallan Jennet, a 14-year-old boy from the Marshall Islands, a country that lies near the equator in the Pacific Ocean, is the first patient in the U.S. to undergo a procedure that does just that.

Jennet’s face became disfigured when he fell onto a live power line at age 9. Earlier this year he flew to New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai, in New York City, to undergo multiple surgeries that would restore his sense of smell and taste.

“The procedure is akin to a ‘nose transplant’ in that we were able to replace the nose with a functional implant,” lead physician Tal Dagan, associate adjunct surgeon, said in a Mount Sinai blog post. “This procedure may be a breakthrough in facial reconstruction because the patient will never have to deal with the standard issues of transplantation, such as tissue rejection or a lifetime of immunosuppressive therapies . . .

Benicia, Calif.-based nonprofit Canvasback Missions Inc., an organization that provides health care and health education to the Pacific Islands, funded Jennet and his mother’s travel and medical expenses to New York. To carry out the subsequent surgeries, Dagan and Dr. Grigoriy Mashkevich, assistant professor of Otolaryngology, Division of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Mount Sinai, collaborated with Oxford Performance Materials Inc., a Windsor, Connecticut-based 3-D printing company. (Read more from “14-Year-Old Receives First 3-D Printed Nose in US” HERE)

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You’ll Never Guess How Fast This Italian Doctor Thinks He Can Perform a Head Transplant

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download (7)The Italian doctor who has claimed that he could transplant a man’s head onto a donor’s body has said that he could do much of the procedure in less than an hour.

The procedure — which Canavero has admitted is just a first step towards his ultimate aim of creating immortality — will see a man’s head removed and placed on a donor’s body [and] get cooled down — as it is when doctors operate on some parts of the brain — and switched onto the different body. Doctors will then have a few minutes to attach the blood vessels . . .

After that, the full joining process could take up to 24 hours. Canavero said that it would be carried out by a team of doctors to ensure that none of them got tired, and that doctors and surgeons from around the world had inquired about joining that team.

Canavero said that he will explain the procedure in depth at a neurosurgeons’ conference on June 12. “I’ll prove it is totally possible to all the skeptics there,” he told Mail Online. . .

As well as casting doubt on the scientific likelihood of the procedure, doctors have said that if successful it could cause huge problems for Canavero. One expert warned that Spidonov could suffer something “a lot worse than death”. (Read more from “You’ll Never Guess How Fast This Italian Doctor Thinks He Can Perform a Head Transplant” HERE)

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Meet the Man Who Will Be the First to Undergo Head-To-Body Transplant [+video]

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manDoctors seem to be a step closer to performing a breakthrough surgery: transplanting a human head onto another body. A Russian man with a rare genetic muscle-wasting disorder has volunteered to be the first to try the procedure.

“I’m very interested in technology, and anything progressive that might change people’s lives for the better,” Valery Spiridonov from the Russian city of Vladimir, told RT.

Spiridonov, a 30-year-old qualified computer scientist, works for an IT firm.

He said that his disease is getting worse every year, and usually people with Werdnig-Hoffman disorder – a disease that wastes muscles – don’t live longer than 20 years, so it would be a chance to prolong his life and help scientific research in the process.

“Doing this isn’t only an excellent opportunity for me, but will also create a scientific basis for future generations, no matter what the actual outcome of the surgery is,” he said. (Read more from “Meet the Man Who Will Be the First to Undergo Head-To-Body Transplant [+video]” HERE)

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