At the age of 8 years, the American Zion Harvey became the first person on the planet who received a pair of donor resulting from the complex transplant operation. Two years later the doctor, leading his business, spoke about the progress, noting that, despite the generally successful operation, this emerging area of medicine is accompanied by many risks and problems.
While still a baby, Zion lost both hands and both feet caused by a bacterial infection, quickly passed over in sepsis. In addition to the amputation, the poor child had to endure and even kidney failure. It took him a speedy operation is a partial transplant of one of them. After his body recovered from the sepsis and renal transplant, doctors decided that Zion may be a good candidate for a single innovation, but a very dangerous method: bilateral transplantation of the hands and forearms, on the completion of the transplant operation which took 40 medical personnel and nearly 11 hours of grueling treatments.
The transplant was successful, although for of Zion it was a very hard struggle. After about a year after the operation the boy was able to hold a baseball bat. 18 months after the procedure, the progress of regeneration and recovery of motor function of his hands became more pronounced. Today it might control movement in a more coordinated manner.
Zion learned to write, to eat, dress and walk to the bathroom. The boy became more independent than before the procedure. Unfortunately, he also had to survive the eight episodes of the body’s rejection of the new limbs, in which the cells of his immune system began to attack the tissue of the transplanted hands. These problems have largely been solved with the help of prescribed medicines. In addition, Zion continues to attend physiotherapy. Experts say that, having studied the ways in which the child’s body was recovered after each case, they will now be able to improve these processes for future patients.
The first and a failed transplant of the hands was performed in the 60-ies. Since then, more than 100 people have undergone the transplant of one or both hands with varying levels of success. Particularly noteworthy is the case of 2000, when the Malaysian surgeons transplanted hand of a deceased child to his identical twin.
The success of Zion in 2015 gave the researchers plenty of new information to study, especially when you consider that at the time of the operation the boy was older than the kid in the Malaysian case, therefore, the level of development of his brain was already less “optimized” for adaptation after surgery.
The first bilateral transplant of the hands of a child found to be successful
Nikolai Khizhnyak