Uterus transplants are on the cutting-edge of medicine and it’s uncommon for a baby to be born to women who receive them. It’s still a relatively rare operation that very few specialists can perform.
The procedure can cost around $500,000, but allows infertile women to give birth to a child by having a healthy uterus, typically from a family member, transplanted into their body.
According to CNN, only around one dozen children have been born to women who received uterus transplants by a living relative in the last couple of years – we know of cases in Sweden, the United States, and Serbia.
Now there’s news that an amazing new breakthrough has been made after a baby girl was born to a woman who received a uterus transplant at the Hospital das Clínicas, at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.
The team published their research and news of the delivery (which occurred last year) in this month’s edition of the medical journal The Lancet.
What’s unique about this latest birth is that the uterus transplanted into the recipient came from a deceased woman!
The 32-year-old new mother at the center of the story had been born without a uterus due to a genetic condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome. While you may not have heard of it, it affects 1 in 4500 women all over the world.
Because the rest of her reproductive organs still functioned, she was able to ovulate and produce an egg.
The egg was then removed from the body, and combined with sperm in a laboratory in a process known as in-vitro fertilization.
The donor was a 45-year-old woman who had given birth to three children and had died of a rare form of stroke.
The reason this type of donation is such a big deal is that there are relatively few women willing to have their uteruses removed in order to become donors.
Being able to use remove the organs from deceased patients – who had, of course, consented to it prior to their deaths – would increase the pool of potential donors (just as it does for hearts and kidney and other organs).
This is the first time the procedure using a deceased donor has resulted in a successful birth. Ten previous attempts were tried and ended in failure or miscarriage.
Interestingly, after the healthy baby girl was born via C-section, doctors removed the transplanted uterus from the recipient immediately after the birth. Because recipients have to take immunosuppressive drugs and get cutting-edge medical care, it didn’t make sense for her to continue to be treated.
Doctors told Scientific American that they wanted to focus their attention on helping more women have children rather than helping the same woman have multiple children.
This success doesn’t mean it will be easy from here on out. The same Brazilian team tried the procedure on another woman and she rejected the uterus a few days later. Two other women in the program are awaiting donors, but since it’s not a common procedure, donors are hard to come by.
More research on how to most efficiently collect uteruses from deceased donors still needs to be done. Normally, other organs are removed first and it takes about 3 hours post-mortem to get to the uterus, which is not ideal.
But researchers at Baylor University have shows that the uterus can be removed before other organs without affecting their viability.
There is also research going on in the US into uterine transplants from deceased donors – the Cleveland Clinic, Baylor University, and the University of Pennsylvania’s hospitals are all working on the next success story.
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