Doctors who gave a French woman the world’s first partial face transplant did not try normal reconstructive surgery first, violating the advice of a French government ethics panel, a surgeon familiar with the case said Thursday.
Dr. Laurent Lantieri also said he was concerned the patient may not be fit psychologically for the operation and its demands.
The 38-year-old woman, whose identity has not been disclosed, had surgery to replace her nose, lips and chin in Amiens in northern France on Sunday. The donor was a brain-dead patient whose family gave their consent.
Although the woman was mauled by a dog in May, surgeons immediately sought a face transplant donor without trying to repair her face through conventional surgical methods, said Lantieri, a reconstructive surgeon.
“The ethics committee said this kind of transplant should never be considered as an emergency procedure,” said Lantieri, a reconstructive surgeon at Henri Mondor Hospital in Paris, which is part of the federation of public hospitals in France. “You cannot have informed consent as an emergency procedure.”
Lantieri said a surgeon in Lille who had seen the woman’s medical record was concerned about her psychological suitability to endure the operation and adhere to the complex drugs needed life-long to ensure the operation’s success.
The operation was done Sunday by ground-breaking transplant surgeon Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard and Dr. Bernard Devauchelle. Dubernard led teams that performed a hand transplant in 1998 and the world’s first double forearm transplant in January 2000.
The hand transplant recipient later had it amputated. Doctors said he failed to take the required drugs and his body rejected the limb.
Lantieri said he was fearful that this transplant could turn out like that first hand transplant if the patient is psychologically unstable.
The face transplant patient was to have a second experimental treatment today — an infusion of the donor’s bone marrow — to try to prevent rejection of the new tissue.
“Maybe Jean-Michel Dubernard is revolutionizing the concept of transplantation,” Lantieri said, but added that the patient now was being subjected to two untested treatments.
Another surgeon familiar with the case told the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia sounded more optimistic despite the woman’s horrific injuries, which he said were caused by her own dog.
“She still has her own eyes, which are a lot of a person’s expression ... we’d expect she’d turn out to be a pleasant-looking girl,” said Dr. Earl Owen of Sydney, Australia.
Owen said he supervised the French surgeons as they practiced for the procedure.
He said the woman will look more like herself than the donor, who he said was a woman.
“We expect the bone structure underneath to be a more powerful delineator of what the outcome will be physically than the skin and the nose and the lips,” Owen told the Morning Herald.
Lantieri also said that while he had concerns, “I’m still very positive.
“Dubernard is a great surgeon. We have to wait now to see if it succeeds.”
