Surgeons from Cleveland Clinic have performed the nation’s first uterus transplant offering a new multi-step path to parenthood.
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To minimize risk, the clinic is only using deceased uterus donors.
The recipient, a 26-year-old woman named Lindsey, had the nine-hour operation to surgically implant a deceased donor’s uterus into her body on February 24.
They are parents to “three handsome little boys” whom they adopted through the foster system, she said. “From that moment on, I have prayed that God would allow me the opportunity to experience pregnancy”, she said in an interview.
“Uterus transplant is not just about a surgery and moving a uterus from here to there”. “She’ll be here for a month or two after surgery”, Rebecca Flyckt, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the Cleveland Clinic, told The Guardian.
The hospital announced last fall that it would attempt 10 transplants as part of a clinical trial. Using those eggs, doctors freeze six to 10 embryos before the woman undergoes the transplant.
Falcone said the process of screening the donor and the donor organ is no different than for other organs, such as the heart or liver.
Doctors at Cleveland Clinic trained with Swedish doctors to prepare for the surgery.
There is no blood test that allows doctors to monitor the health of the transplanted organ, Tzakis said, so that is done visually and through biopsies.
The women who will participate in the trial include some born without a uterus – which happens to one in 5,000 women – and others who had a hysterectomy due to cancer or other problems.
The woman, who gave only her first name, Lindsey, was born with a condition known as uterine factor infertility, which means the womb is missing or does not work properly, making pregnancy impossible.
The uterus transplant team tweeted Monday that, while the procedure is “significant step forward”, they aren’t celebrating yet.
Although this is the first uterus transplant to take place in the United States, it is not the first to ever be completed. After one or two babies, the uterus will be removed so that she does not have to spend her whole life on anti-rejection drugs, the doctors said.
“We don’t exactly know how this uterus would respond to the normal signals of labor”, said Dr. Uma Perni, who specializes in high risk pregnancies. Dr. Tzakis mentioned that the surgery has been considered life-enhancing, such as that of face or hand transplantation.
Although Lindsey now has a uterus, she is still a while away from actually becoming pregnant.
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Dr. Mats Brannstrom of Sahlgrenska University Hospital at the University of Gothenburg said the Cleveland surgery marked the 13th transplant worldwide. Sweden reported the first successful birth in 2014, with five healthy babies so far.
