Первая в России операция по пересадку лица



THE FIRST FACE TRANSPLANT SURGERY IN RUSSIA

Lenina DA, Veretelnikova YuYа

Saratov State Medical University n.a. V.I. Razumovsky, Department of foreign languages

A face transplant is a medical procedure to replace all or part of a person’s face using tissue from a cadaver. 32 face transplant operations have been successfully performed in seven different countries. Russia has become the 8th country in the world.

Russian military and civil surgeons performed the first in the country face transplant surgery on a serviceman who had suffered electrical burns in august 2012. When Nikolay was urgently taken to the hospital by the airplane, his whole body was damaged, but the face was injured even more. Military doctors saved his life and restored his eyesight. After the possibility of reconstructive and plastic surgery had been exhausted, it was decided that the partial face transplant from a donor would be performed. The man, who died in Kurskiy region from a severe traumatic brain injury, became Nikolay’s savior. The experts were preparing for one of the most complex operations. The surgeons rehearsed the transplantation on a replica of the patient’s facial pattern printed on 3D-printers. The human face has

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its own unique structure, so the doctors had no right for mistake. Retrieval of donor tissue lasted 12 hours, and facial tissue transplant to the patient continued for 18 hours. There was used a complex set of tissues, containing the skin, subcutaneous fat, muscle, cartilage and bone tissue elements. The operation, which lasted more than 18 hours, was held at St Petersburg Military Medical Academy named after S.M. Kirov in May 2015. But the results of this hardest work were presented to the society only on the 27th of November 2015 at the National Center of Russian defense management by the experts of Russian Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Health and the Federal Medical-Biological Agency. According to experts, such complex heterogeneous tissue transplantation has been performed for the first time in the world.

Today doctors are sure that the operation was successful and the young man would be able to return to normal everyday life. In December the patient underwent one more plastic surgery after which he came back home.

Transplantation became possible thanks to the technological advances of modern medicine and the accumulated experience of scientists around the world. This is a revolutionary breakthrough in Russian transplantation surgery. After all, the success of such an operation gives hope to many patients whom a regular plastic surgery cannot help.