Surgeons have performed the world’s first double arm transplant. The 16-hour operation was carried out last Friday on a farm worker who lost both arms in an accident.
The 54-year-old man was given the arms of a teenage boy who is believed to have died in a road crash. Plastic surgeon Professor Edgar Biemer and his colleague Christof Hoehnke led a surgical team of 30 to perform the operation at a clinic in Munich.
The patient, who lost his arms in a threshing machine six years ago, is said to be recovering well from the surgery. Doctors said he regained consciousness on Sunday and smiled at his wife. He is expected to remain in hospital for five weeks of intensive therapy.
Doctors warned it was too early to say whether the transplant would succeed. Professor Biemer, 65, said: ‘The forces of rejection are stronger with limbs than with any other transplants because the skin is the largest immune barrier for the body. It instinctively rejects skin it doesn’t recognise.
‘New medicines have been developed to stop this rejection and the patient in this case will be taking this medicine all his life.’ He said it was difficult to forecast the psychological effect on the man of having the arms of a youth 35 years his junior.
The donor was a 19-year-old boy from Augsburg in Bavaria. Neither has been named. One therapist at the Isar Clinic, where the patient is recovering, said: ‘At 54, he will have to come to terms with the fact that limbs he has been without for so long are back, but that they are those of a much younger person."
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