Frenchwoman who received 1st face transplant dies
LILLE (AFP) — The world’s first face transplant recipient, Frenchwoman Isabelle Dinoire, died in April “after a long illness,” a hospital said Tuesday.
In 2005, at the age of 38, Dinoire received a graft comprising the nose, lips and chin of a brain-dead donor to replace parts of her face that had been mauled by her dog.
The hospital in Amiens, northern France, confirmed the death of “Mrs D., the first patient in the world to receive a face transplant.”
The hospital said her death had been kept quiet to protect her family’s privacy.
The ground-breaking operation had raised hopes around the world for victims with faces disfigured in accidents or assaults, with surgeons in the United States, Spain, China, Belgium, Poland and Turkey performing partial or full transplants since the groundbreaking surgery on Dinoire.
But the initial enthusiasm over the procedure has been tempered by a daunting risk that the patient’s body will eventually reject the donor’s tissue.
Le Figaro newspaper reported that Dinoire’s body had rejected the transplant last year “and she had lost part of the use of her lips.”
The drugs that she had to take to prevent her body from rejecting the transplant left her susceptible to cancer, and two forms of cancer had developed, the report said.
Jean-Pierre Meningaud, of a team at a Paris hospital that has performed seven face transplants, told AFP: “All the patients we operated on have had reactions of rejection, which leads to higher doses of drugs, and with them, the risks.”
He added that in addition to the risk of rejection, a number of other problems can crop up, including “grafts that age a little faster than (the patient), problems of (skin) color, high blood pressure (and) mood.”
Meningaud said that with Dinoire’s death, “we should put these transplants on hold pending advances in immunology.”
Dinoire gave a remarkable news conference in February 2006, just three months after the operation, when the blonde, blueeyed mother of two appeared before a scrum of TV cameras.