A face transplant involves transplanting facial material from a cadaver donor to someone else, and can be used to address congenital birth defects or replace a damaged face. There are two types of transplant: partial and complete. The surgery is complex and patients must take lifelong immunosuppressive drugs to prevent rejection. The resulting face is a hybrid between the donor and recipient.
A face transplant is a medical procedure in which facial material from a cadaver donor is transplanted to someone else. This procedure can be used to address congenital birth defects that have severely disfigured the face, and to replace a face that has been damaged due to trauma. The first face transplant happened in India, and it was actually a face replant, in which a young girl’s face was reattached after it was torn off in a farming accident.
The foundation for these transplants was established when doctors began transplanting other organs and tissues. Fact is a particularly difficult area to work in due to it being so visible, making errors and misalignments very noticeable. However, the very visibility of the face is one of the things that makes a face transplant so attractive to reconstructive surgeons, because a severely scarred or damaged face can be a heavy social burden, and a face transplant has the potential to give someone a more familiar and normal expression. The alternative to this transplant are skin grafts, taken from the patient’s body or from a donor, which tend to look more like a quilt than a face.
There are two types of transplant: partial and complete. In a partial face transplant, only a section of tissue is removed from a donor and implanted onto the recipient’s face. In a complete transplant, the entire face is used and in a face and scalp transplant, the scalp is also transplanted. In all cases, the surgery involved is very complex and the patient must be on lifelong immunosuppressive drugs to prevent rejection of the donor face.
A French doctor performed a successful partial face transplant in 2005 on a woman who had been severely mauled by dogs, and a number of hospitals began exploring the procedure soon after. Like many innovative surgical techniques in their early years, this transplant was initially considered highly experimental, and numerous studies were conducted to make it as safe and effective as possible.
When a face transplant is performed, the recipient does not take on the characteristics of the donor. Only the skin of the face is transplanted, with the underlying muscle and bone structure from the donor. The resulting face is often described as a “hybrid” between the donor and the recipient, as the new face won’t be perfect for the old one. In the case of someone with birth defects who has opted for facial reconstructive surgery, the new face will be completely different from the previous one.
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