In November, surgical medicine is entering a new era with the first head transplantation to a person with atrophied body.
This historic operation was led by the Italian neurochirgurgian: Sergio Canavero.
"The surgery lasted 18 hours, everyone said it was impossible but it was a success."
This operation, surgically called cephalosomatic anastomosis (ACS), was performed on two cadavers at the Harbin Medical University in China.
The patient was a young Russian man named Valery Spiridonov, 30, who was suffering from spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic disease characterized by muscle weakness and atrophy *. His head was moved from his body to be grafted onto the body of a brain dead donor.
In this case, the two dead men had given their bodies to science and their families had signed a consent. The scientists explain that two teams of five surgeons worked together on the two corpses, to prepare the head of the "receiver" on one side and the body of the "donor" on the other.
) The goal? A kind of general rehearsal before attempting the intervention with a live recipient patient.
"ACS is considered the only therapeutic option for a certain group of neuromuscular diseases (such as Duchenne's disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) that so far are incurable by other means." According to the team of Xiaoping Ren and Sergio Canavero.
The connection of the patient's head to a new, functional body could offer them an additional chance. Indeed, patients like Valery Spiridonov suffering from Werdnig-Hoffman's disease, close to Charcot's disease, say they are ready to volunteer.
*Atrophy: loss of volume or size of part of the body.
*post mortem: after death.