http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article6047569.ece
A 30-year-old burns victim has become the first man to receive two new hands and a new face after groundbreaking transplant surgery.
Forty doctors, working in two teams, took 30 hours to complete the simultaneous grafts at Henri Mondor Hospital in Créteil, Paris, at the weekend. French surgeons also performed the world’s first hand transplant, in 1998, and first face transplant in 2005.
Health officials said that Laurent Lantiéri had led the team that carried out the face transplant, while Christian Dumontier oversaw the double hand transplant.
A spokesman for the Paris Hospital Authority said that the hands had been grafted on to the patient above his wrists while the entire upper part of the man’s face — including his nose, eyelids, forehead, scalp and ears — was also replaced. Previous face transplants all involved the lower part of the face. Officials said that the man had been burnt in an accident in 2004, which had "prevented him from having any sort of social life".
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Professor Lantiéri described the operation as a success and said that the patient’s general condition was good. He will remain in intensive care for a fortnight.
Four of the six face transplants carried out around the world have been completed in France, three of them by Professor Lantiéri. Last month he completed a face transplant on a 28-year-old man disfigured by a shotgun accident during a clay pigeon shoot.
"In a few seconds, you see the colour come back into the face,” he said in an interview about that operation. “This face which was completely white becomes pink. It is something magic to see - a moment of extraordinary intensity."
The world’s first face transplant patient was Isabelle Dinoire, 38, who received the graft after being mauled by her dogs in northern France. It took her three years to consider the new face as hers, she said.
"Yes, that’s it, it’s part of me," she said in a recent interview. "I get the feeling I’m looking at something pretty — things are better from that point of view — but it’s true that at the beginning it was not easy.
"The hardest thing to accept was to have the inside of someone else’s mouth. It wasn’t mine, it was all soft, it was atrocious."
Mrs Dinoire said that she had recovered "normal sensations" in her new face.
The world’s first hand transplant, carried out by Jean-Michel Dubernard on Clint Hallam, a 48-year-old New Zealander, was less successful. Three years after the operation, Mr Hallam said that he could not get accustomed to the graft and asked for it to be removed.
Professor Dubernard said: "This led us to only carry out grafts on people [who had] lost both hands in order to facilitate the psychological and physiological acceptance of the graft."
Patrick Warnke, a surgeon at the University of Kiel in Germany, denounced what he described as the “hype” around face transplants.
“I’m worried that patients don’t understand what it means to be on these drugs for the rest of their lives,” he said.
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Remind me of the show FACE OFF.