Male hands transplanted to a woman change color and shape

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Male hands transplanted to a woman change color and shape
Male hands transplanted to a woman change color and shape
Anonim

Fewer than 100 hand transplants have been performed worldwide and changes in color or shape have never been seen before!

“I don’t know how the transformation came about,” said 21-year-old Shreya, who underwent the first inter-sex hand transplant in Asia, “but now it looks like my own hands. The skin color after the transplant was very dark, not that I once worried, but now it matches my tone."

And surgeon Dr. Mohit Sharma added: "We hope to publish two cases of hand transplants in a scientific journal. We have documented both color change and shape change, but we need more evidence to understand the shape change of fingers and hands."

This may continue as long as there is limited research on intergender (female-to-male or male-to-female) hand transplants.

How it came to hand transplant

In September 2016, Shreya lost both arms in a bus collision on her way to university.

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After the amputation, she learned that a student from a nearby college had been pronounced dead (brain malfunctioning) the same day after a bicycle accident.

Although hand donations are rare, his family has agreed to donate their hands and other organs to science.

The blood groups were compatible. Therefore, the doctors decided to operate on the same day. The transplant lasted 13 hours, during which a team of 20 surgeons sutured the donor's hand to the bones, arteries, veins, tendons, and muscles before the skin was sutured to Shreya's upper limb.

For a year and a half, she remained in Kochi for intensive physiotherapy. It took time for the peripheral nerves to develop and the sensation grew 1-2 mm every day. “The hand was heavy, it was cumbersome to begin with,” she says.

Changes in shape and color

Over the past 3-4 months, Shreya's mother noticed that her daughter's fingers became thinner, slightly longer, like a woman's.

“I see her hand every day. The fingers became like a woman's, the wrist became smaller. These are wonderful changes, she said.

No one really knows why and how her new hands changed color and shape.

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The surgeons who operated on suggest that female hormones led to the change: “This is our first time a man's hand is transplanted into a woman. We can only assume that female hormones caused the change, but it is difficult to assess the exact cause.”

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Last year, Shreya was able to write her exams on her own - with her new hands.

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