UPMC On Topic Transcript
Face Transplantation
Joseph Losee, MD
Director, Composite Tissue Allotransplantation Program
For patients with devastating facial deformities, many of them are shut-ins, they are unable to be in a crowd, they’re unable to breathe normally, they’re unable to smell, they’re unable to speak, they’re unable to be understood, and they’re unable to eat.
Many of these patients become shut-ins, and those with devastating facial deformities, are often socially dead.
Great Expectations
Reconstructive transplantation allows surgeons like myself to offer patients things that we could otherwise never give them. For those with devastating facial deformities reconstructive surgery, traditional reconstructive surgery, can do a lot.
But we’re still very limited and do not have the ability to reconstruct many portions of the face to appear normal. The eyelids, the nose, and the lips, we still are very limited in our ability to adequately reconstruct these, these parts, the important parts of the face. Reconstructive surgery can do a lot but it has many limitations in obtaining normal human appearance.
In face transplantation, in a single operation can routinely achieve superior functional and appearance related results that years of reconstructive surgery could no, no way come close to.
Given the expertise at UPMC in craniofacial and microsurgery coupled with its experience in transplantation, we are positioned to either perform partial or complete face transplants.
Using the Pittsburgh Protocol, which is a therapy designed at UPMC, we’ve been able to offer patients reconstructive transplantation with a decreased amount of postoperative immunosuppression therefore swinging the risk/benefit ratio in our favor.
Appearance and function restored
In the world to date those patients who have undergone facial transplantation have gained both functional and appearance-related benefits. They’ve been able to have their tracheostomies removed, they’ve been able to eat solid food once again, they’ve been able to breathe and actually regained the sense of smell. And so from a functional point of view there’s been great, great reward and from an appearance related procedure, patients who have undergone facial transplantation in one operation have been able to have significantly improved results over the multiple surgeries they’ve had with traditional reconstructive surgery.
For more information, contact us at 412-648-9207.