In 2016 , surgeons fromJohns Hopkins Universityare run to perform 60 penis transplants , a type of operation which has never been transmit before in the U.S. The first will be an unnamed patient injured in Afghanistan .
The recipients will be veterans who have suffered a genitourinary injury , having mislay all or part of their phallus and testicle . The reed organ will arrive from a recently deceased giver , and the medical team expect it to start working within month , developing sense and urinary function , then finally adopt the ability to have gender .
The surgery use up 12 hr , during which the doctors will connect two to six nerves and six or seven arteries and veins . The patients should be able to pass water autonomously within a few week , but other functions might take longer to return . For sexual functions to explicate , the nerves of the patient role have to uprise in the donor organ and timing reckon on the extent of the trauma , as spunk grow at about 2.5 cm ( 1 column inch ) per month .
Once the transplant is successful the gentleman’s gentleman will be put on anti - rejection medicine , which break off the immune system attacking the new pipe organ . These character of medicine have side effects , and the great unwashed take them have an increased risk of contracting transmission and developing cancer .
The surgery is considered highly experimental . There have only been two other penis transplanting : a failed one in Chinain 2006and a successful one in South Africain 2014 . Johns Hopkins University has afford permission to do 60 transplantation and it will monitor the results closely . If they are positive , it will consider making this surgery a stock treatment .
During the recent struggle in Afghanistan and Iraq,12 percent of war injurieswere genitourinary one . According to the Department of Defense Trauma Registry , 1,367 human being in military service during those conflicts suffered a genital wound .
“ These GU injuries are not things we discover about or read about very often , ” Dr W. P. Andrew Lee , the chairperson of credit card and reconstructive surgery at Johns Hopkins , toldThe New York Times . “ I think one would agree it is as devastating as anything that our wounded warrior suffer , for a young man to add up home in his early 20s with the pelvic area altogether destroyed . ”
[ H / T : The New York Times ]
