Surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic on Monday introduced the 26-year-old woman who received the first uterus transplant carried out on US soil.
The woman, who chose to share only her first name, Lindsey, was wheeled into the room by her husband, Blake. She expressed her thanks to the eight-person team that transplanted the uterus on 24 February, and to the family of the donor, a woman in her 30s who died suddenly.
At 16, Lindsey was told she would never be able to have children. If the transplant holds, she could be able to get pregnant.
“From that moment on, I have prayed that God would allow me the opportunity to experience pregnancy,” she said. “Here we are today at the beginning of that journey.”
The couple have adopted three boys; they asked for privacy in order to protect their children.
Lindsey is the first of 10 women who will undergo uterine transplants as part of a clinical trial by the Cleveland Clinic. If successful, the treatment could provide an alternative for women who are unable to have children because they are born without a uterus or lose their uterus to disease.
Lindsey will heal under supervision for a year, before the uterus transplant recipient is ready to bear a healthy pregnancy via in vitro fertilization (IVF).
“She’ll be here for a month or two after surgery,” said Rebecca Flyckt, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the Cleveland Clinic. “After that we expect that she will be able to return home. She should be able to have a fairly normal life.”
Each study participant underwent IVF, to bank six to 10 embryos. A year after transplant, each patient will have the embryos transferred one by one until a healthy pregnancy is reached.
The women will be monitored during their pregnancies by obstetrician-gynecologist Uma Perni, who said: “My hope is that they get very close to 37 weeks, which is what’s considered full term.”
Babies will be born by C-section. The uterus transplants are temporary, and are expected to carry one to two pregnancies, both delivered by C-section, before being removed.
“The focus of this procedure is not on the uterus,” said clinic bio-ethicist Ruth Farrell. “It’s on women and children and families.”
Sweden is the only country where uterine transplants have been conducted successfully. Nine women have had them and four have given birth to healthy, if premature babies. Two transplants failed and had to be removed, one because of an infection and the other because of a blood clot. Rejection is always a possibility, the Cleveland surgeons said.
To minimize risk, the clinic is only using deceased uterus donors.
“We have to think about the donor,” Farrell said. “There have been complications in living donors and we want to take every step to minimize that.”
The clinic did not specify the cost of the procedure. Since this is a research trial, it said, the immediate cost was covered by a grant.
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