2023-11-20 12:33:14
“It feels weird to talk once more“. A woman has just benefited from the first larynx transplant in France, an intervention presented Monday in Lyon by the medical team who hopes to be able to repeat this “prowess” shortly.
Identified only by her first name, Karine, the patient, aged 49, had been breathing through a tracheotomy for around twenty years, without being able to speak, due to complications linked to intubation following a cardiac arrest in 1996.
A few days following the transplant, carried out on September 2 and 3 in Lyon, she was able to say a few words. She has since followed vocal cord, swallowing and breathing rehabilitation sessions with a speech therapist, in the hope of lastingly regaining the use of speech.
“My daughters had never heard me speak”
Her immunosuppressive treatment was reinforced following the onset of rejection but she was able to return home to the south of France on October 26.
She was therefore not expected to participate in the presentation of the intervention on Monday, but explained in writing that she had volunteered ten years ago, “to return to a normal life“.
“My daughters had never heard me speak“, she writes, ensuring that she is armed with “courage” and of “patience” to deal with pain and the work of relearning.
Professor Philippe Céruse, head of the ENT and head and neck surgery department at the Croix-Rousse hospital, also showed determination before coordinating this unprecedented transplant in France.
The idea for this procedure arose during the world’s first larynx transplant, carried out in 1998 in Cleveland, in the United States, on a man who had lost his vocal cords in a motorcycle accident.
The surgeon inquired but left it there, until 2010 when, “a little by chance”, he met a Colombian colleague during a conference who reproduced this very delicate graft without ever publishing anything.
Dr. Luis Fernando Tintinago Londono invites him to Cali for a week to show him how to remove a larynx, “one of the most complex aspects” because this organ “is innervated by very small nerves and vascularized by very small arteries and veins which intersect”, as Professor Céruse explains.
For the next decade, he trained with a team of experts, obtained approvals, and began looking for eligible patients. In 2019, “Karine” was identified. But Covid interrupts everything.
In the meantime, two larynx transplants have been recorded in the medical literature, one in California in 2010 and one in Poland in 2015. This is not much because these operations are not a priority: a dysfunctional larynx is very disabling but does not pose a risk. endangering the lives of patients.
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