Brazilian doctors report a medical sensation: For the first time, a woman has given birth to a baby that has matured in a uterus transplanted from a dead donor.
In Brazil, for the first time, a child was born whose mother had been transplanted the uterus of a deceased. The little girl was born a year ago in São Paulo, as the journal „The Lancet“ reported.
According to the doctors, the mother was born because of a rare condition without her own uterus. In 2016, the 32-year-old got the uterus of a deceased 45-year-old implanted in a more than ten-hour operation. The mother of three died of a stroke.
Four months before the transplantation, eight eggs of the 32-year-olds were fertilized and frozen by in vitro fertilization. Seven months later, the woman became pregnant through artificial insemination. In the 36th week of pregnancy came in December 2017 by caesarean section, the baby with a weight of 2.5 kilograms on the world. During the cesarean section, the transplanted uterus was also removed. Mother and child were able to leave the hospital three days later and are well one year later well.
Hope for women with children
The successful uterus transplantation gives new hope to many women who can not yet have children, according to the authors of the article. „Our findings are a proof of concept for a new option for women with infertility due to their wombs,“ said Dani Ejzenberg from the University of São Paulo Teaching Hospital. „The number of people willing to donate organs after their death is much higher than the number of living donors.“
So far, eleven uterine transplants have been successful when the uterus was donated by a living woman. After such a transplant, a child was born in Sweden for the first time in 2014. However, there are many more women who hope for a donor uterus than live organ donors.
For this reason, researchers looked for ways to remove the uterus from deceased women and to implant it in women who would otherwise not be able to have children. Experiments with uterus transplants of the deceased were so far unsuccessful. The trade magazine reports on ten trials in the Czech Republic, Turkey and the USA.
