(Image: Vall d’Hebron University Hospital)
This man now has a new face. The scans above reveal the abnormal growth of blood vessels that had caused him vision and speech problems, and would have put his life at risk if they started to bleed. The malformed vessels were successfully replaced in February through one of the most complex face transplants yet.
Surgeon Joan-Pere Barret led a team of 45 medical staff at Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona during a 27 hour long operation to reconstruct two-thirds of the patient’s lower face, neck, mouth, tongue and pharynx.
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The challenge of treating the man was formidable because of thousands of rampant blood vessels, visible in pink and orange in the scans, that had built up over 20 years. “These vessels infiltrate normal tissue, so it’s hard to remove them without harming healthy tissue,” says Iain Hutchison, founder and director of the UK charity, Saving Faces. “Completely replacing the malformed tissue with tissue from another person, gets around this complication.”
A similar operation was performed in 2007 by a team of French surgeons, who treated a patient with facial growths. The Spanish team, meanwhile, performed the first full face transplant in 2010, repairing the wounds of a farmer who had accidentally shot himself in the face.
The first partial face transplant was carried out in 2005, where a woman disfigured by her dog was given a new nose, lips and chin from a donor. This was the only option available that would give the woman a chance of speaking again.
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