AUSTIN (Web Desk) – Texas doctors say they have done the world’s first partial skull and scalp transplant to help a man with a large head wound from cancer treatment.
MD Anderson Cancer Center and Houston Methodist Hospital doctors have announced that they did the operation on May 22, the Daily Mail reported.
The recipient is Jim Boysen, a 55-year-old software developer from Austin, Texas.
Radiation treatments for a rare cancer left him with an open wound in his head that would not heal. Along with the scalp and skull, he received a new pancreas and kidney to treat lifelong diabetes.
‘This has been a long journey, and I am so grateful to all the doctors who performed my transplants,’ Boysen said in a press release.
“I’m amazed at how great I feel and am forever grateful that I have another chance to get back to doing the things I love and be with the people I love,” he said.
The 15-hour surgery was performed at Houston Methodist Hospital last Friday, about 20 hours after LifeGift alerted the team to the availability of the organs.
More than 50 health care professionals performed, assisted with or supported the surgery, including specialised reconstructive plastic surgeons and a team of transplant surgeons, a neurosurgeon and an anesthesiologist, nurses and others.
In 2006 Boysen was diagnosed with leiomyosarcoma, a rare cancer of the smooth muscle, on his scalp.
After chemotherapy and radiation he was left with a large, deep wound on his head that included the scalp and the full thickness of his skull down to his brain.
Boysen also had been diagnosed with diabetes aged five. As the head wound formed, his kidney and pancreas, which were first transplanted in 1992, were failing.
The scalp and skull wound were preventing doctors from performing a new double organ transplant on the kidney and pancreas while at the same time their failing prevented his scalp reconstruction.
Four years in the making, the two surgeries went smoothly, according to doctors, and spanned 24 hours.
