A woman who could not get pregnant delivered a healthy baby girl after receiving a uterus transplant from a deceased donor in a medical first.
Uterine transplants from living donors have been successful before with at least 13 babies having been born that way since 2013.
But this is a first. And such a successful operation with an organ from a deceased donor can highly increased availability of organs.
Speaking to the New York Times, Dr. Allan D. Kirk, the chief surgeon at Duke University Health System said:
Biologically, organs of the living and the dead aren’t all that different… But the availability of deceased donors certainly could open this up to a much broader number of patients.
Infertility is known to affect more than 1 in 10 women worldwide.
In this case, the mother was born without a uterus and had received the organ from a 45-year-old woman who had already delivered 3 children naturally.
She had died of a stroke.
The transplant surgery itself had taken 10 long hours, following which the doctors had to wait for menstruation to begin so that it became evident that the body had not rejected the organ.
After getting sure of this, they implanted the uterus with one of the patient’s own eggs.
And a healthy baby girl was born on December 17 in Hospital das Clínicas at the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil.