A veteran soldier will be privileged to undergo America’s first penis transplant after suffering severe damage to his sexual organ in Afghanistan.
According to the New York Times, some surgeons at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, USA, have announced that within the next several months, they will take an organ from a deceased donor and give it to the soldier. Over the years, the Department of Defense in America has collated 1, 367 men who have suffered genital wounds largely as a result of improvised explosive devices detonating in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Previous efforts for those who suffered damage to their penises involved using tissues from other parts of the body, although, with this procedure, erection was only possible with implants that have problems such as infections.
The new surgery is first being offered to soldiers who meet certain qualifications, such as having an intact urethra. Doctors will then connect nerves, veins and arteries from the donor penis to the recipient in a 12-hour surgery.
This is not the first time a patient will be receiving a penis transplant. In 2014, a 21-year-old South African man received the world’s first successful penis transplant after his penis was amputated as a result of a botched circumcision during a coming-of-age ceremony. The unidentified man was expected to have a recovery time of two years, but doctors say he and his girlfriend became pregnant in 2015.
Doctors at Johns Hopkins are hoping that similar success will be recorded for America’s wounded warriors.
Last year, scientists at Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in America announced that they had tested lab-grown penises on rabbits, and were hoping to start human trials within five years.
In 2016, another form of extreme medicine- a head transplant, will be performed for the first time on a Russian scientist who was born with a genetic defect that left him disabled since birth.
Source: Daily Mail
0 comments:
Post a Comment