Swedish doctors transplant wombs into nine women
18 Jan arab news
Nine women in Sweden have successfully received transplanted wombs
donated from relatives and will soon try to become pregnant, the doctor
in charge of the pioneering project has revealed.The women were born
without a uterus or had it removed because of cervical cancer. Most are
in their 30s and are part of the first major experiment to test whether
it's possible to transplant wombs into women so they can give birth to
their own children.
Life-saving transplants of organs such as hearts, livers and kidneys
have been done for decades and doctors are increasingly transplanting
hands, faces and other body parts to improve patients' quality of life.
Womb transplants the first ones intended to be temporary, just to allow
childbearing push that frontier even farther and raise some new
concerns.There have been two previous attempts to transplant a womb in
Turkey and Saudi Arabia but both failed to produce babies.
Scientists in Britain, Hungary and elsewhere are also planning
similar operations but the efforts in Sweden are the most advanced.
"This is a new kind of surgery," Dr. Mats Brannstrom told The Associated
Press in an interview from Goteborg.
"We have no textbook to look at." Brannstrom, chair of the obstetrics
and gynecology department at the University of Gothenburg, is leading
the initiative.
Next month, he and colleagues will run the first-ever workshop on how
to perform womb transplants and they plan to publish a scientific report
on their efforts soon.
He said the nine womb recipients were doing well. Many already had
their periods six weeks after the transplants, an early sign that the
wombs are healthy and functioning.
One woman had an infection in her newly received uterus and others
had some minor rejection episodes, but none of the recipients or donors
needed intensive care after the surgery, Brannstrom said. All left the
hospital within days.
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