Laurent Lantieri, a French surgeon recently carried out a very rare surgical procedure. He carried out a full face operation, which included even tear ducts and eyelids. The operation was carried out on a man who was aged 35 years; he suffered from a genetic disorder.
The operation, conducted on June 27 in Creteil, a Parisian suburb at the Henri Mondor hospital has very few details available, with the surgeon and hospital declining to give any kind of information regarding the operation details, the donor and the patient.
According to the hospital, this operation was the 12th of its kind in the world. The first was carried out in France in 2005, where a woman’s chin, mouth and nose were replaced after she was attacked by a dog. Surgeon Lantieri says that this particular operation is a first for its kind; explaining that it involved the replacements of many different parts of the face.
These kinds of operations are still fairly uncommon and quite difficult to carry out successfully.
Surgeons of the Vall d’Hebron Hospital in Spain stated they conducted the first full face transplant in April. The operation was carried out on a young Spanish man who accidentally shot himself in the face, and thus was unable to eat or breathe on his own. The surgeons replaced his eyelids, teeth, muscles, cheekbones, nose and jaw.
In 2008 in Cleveland, a near-complete face transplant was carried out on a woman, who like the Spanish man, had shot herself in the face.
The only issue with a facial transplant procedure is the risk of rejection by the body, as new organs or cells are considered as foreign tissue.