Spanish hospital claims 1st full-face transplant

April 24, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

MADRID

A team of surgeons has carried out the world’s first full-face transplant on a young Spanish farmer unable to breathe or eat on his own since accidentally shooting himself in the face five years ago.

It was the most extensive operation yet and the 11th known face transplant worldwide.

During the 24-hour surgery, doctors lifted an entire face, including jaw, nose, cheekbones, muscles, teeth and eyelids, and placed it masklike onto the man, Dr. Joan Pere Barret told The Associated Press on Friday.

Transplant experts hailed the surgery, carried out late last month at Barcelona’s Vall d’Hebron Hospital, as a significant advance.

“It is a breakthrough. They are pushing the envelope, and I am very happy for them,” said Dr. Thomas Romo, chief of facial and reconstructive surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York.

The Spanish patient, who was not identified, now has a completely new face from his hairline down and only one visible scar, which looks like a wrinkle running across his neck, said Barret, who headed the 30-member surgical team.

The man cannot yet speak, eat or smile, but he can see and can swallow saliva, the surgeon said. He is expected to be able to eat and breathe on his own in about a week.

“If you look him in the face, you see a normal person,” Barret said. “He sits up, he walks in his hospital room, and he watches television.”

Before the transplant, the 30-year-old patient had had nine surgeries and could breathe only with the help of a ventilator and get nourishment from a feeding tube. He also had problems speaking.

There have been 10 partial transplants worldwide, including in the United States, China and elsewhere in Spain, but this is the first full face transplant, Barret said.

The Spanish operation is similar to a near-total face transplant carried out by a team led by Dr. Maria Siemionow in 2008 in Cleveland on a woman who also was shot in the face.

But the Spanish case “seems to us to be more complex,” said Neil Huband, a spokesman for the UK Facial Transplantation Research Team, based at the Royal Free Hospital in London.