A New York hospital has succeeded for the first time in transplanting an entire eye, including half the face, from a 46-year-old patient who suffered a serious work accident that left him with the loss of his nose, mouth and left arm.
The transplant, which was performed in May, involved a team of more than 140 surgeons, nurses and other health care professionals and took about 21 hours, NYU Langone Health revealed in a statement Thursday.
The patient, Aaron James, is from Arkansas, where he was working as a high-voltage electrician when he suffered a brutal accident in 2021, in which his face struck a high-voltage wire.
Even after undergoing reconstructive surgery, James “lost his left eye, his left (dominant) arm above the elbow, his entire nose and lips, his front teeth, his left cheek, and his chin down to the bone,” this facility describes. health.
During the operations, the surgeons decided to cut the optic nerve as close to the eyeball as possible so that the patient would have more options in the future, which ultimately made the eye transplant possible.
While it is not yet known whether this man will regain vision in the transplanted eye, the new organ showed “extraordinary signs of health, including direct blood flow to the retina,” the hospital said.
The operation was led by the director of the hospital’s face transplant program, Eduardo Rodriguez, who decided to combine the donor’s eye with stem cells from his bone marrow.
This is the first attempt to use stem cells in an optic nerve to stimulate regeneration.
The operation shows that it is possible to perform this type of intervention, but it remains to be seen whether it will have positive effects on vision recovery, or only aesthetic effects.
Source: DN
