First genital transplant surgery offered to wounded veterans
The surgery would bring function back to the area and offer men the possibility of having children
yesterday at 8:00 am
The first penis transplant surgery ever performed in the U.S. will be on a wounded combat veteran by surgeons from Johns Hopkins University.
Penis transplant surgeries have been performed in Africa and are used to help men who are injured during tribe rituals involving circumcision, but U.S. surgeries will primarily be used to help veterans dealing with genital injuries, including the loss of all or part of their penises or testicles.
Doctors call these genitourinary injuries.
The need is greater than you might think, just not talked about as much as traditional war injuries like arm and leg amputations, or even traumatic brain injuries.
“These genitourinary injuries are not things we hear about or read about very often,” Dr. W. P. Andrew Lee said, chairman of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Johns Hopkins. “I think one would agree it is as devastating as anything that our wounded warriors suffer, for a young man to come home in his early 20s with the pelvic area destroyed.”
Out of the three known penis transplants reported in medical journals, two have been successful, and the news brings hope to the nearly 1,400 men who suffered genital wounds in Iraq or Afghanistan between 2001 and 2013.
However, the procedure is experimental, and Johns Hopkins has authorized surgeons to perform 60 surgeries to examine the results and decide if the operation can be offered full time. Like any surgery there are risks, including bleeding, infection and the possibility that the “medicine needed to prevent transplant rejection will increase the odds of cancer.”
Dr. Lee is optimistic men undergoing the surgery will go on and live life as normally as possible.
“Some hope to father children,” he said. “I think that is a realistic goal.”
Since only the penis will be transplanted during the surgery, in time, as the transplant becomes usable, any children fathered will be genetically his, not the donor’s.
This was the case in the South African transplant surgery, according to Dr. Gerald Brandacher, the scientific director of the reconstructive transplantation program at Johns Hopkins. The recipient was a man who had needed a penis amputation due to a botched circumcision, and after his successful penis transplant, he was able to become a father.
The destruction of the genitals is more than just war wound, doctors say.
“Our young male patients would rather lose both legs and an arm than have a urogenital surgery,” Scott E. Skiles, the polytrauma social work supervisor at the Veterans Affaris Palo Alto Health Care System
Sgt. First Class Aaron Causey agrees. Causey lost both legs, one testicle and part of the other from an I.E.D. in Afghanistan in 2011.
“I don’t care who you are—military, civilian, anything—you have an injury like this, it’s more than just a physical injury,” he said.
Though not a life-saving or necessarily ‘needed’ surgery, genitourinary injuries cause damage at the core of the wounded; it takes something from them.
“If you meet these people, you see how important it is,” Dr. Richard J. Redett, director of pediatric plastic and reconstructive surgery at Johns Hopkins, said. “To be missing the penis and parts of the scrotum is devastating. That part of the body is so strongly associated with your sense of self and identity as a male. These guys have given everything they have.”
https://www.military1.com/veterans/article/1564303014-first-genital-transplant-surgery-offered-to-wounded-veterans
