A woman in the United Kingdom has become the recipient of the world’s first successful womb transplant, which was performed by a team of surgeons.
It turned out that the woman’s sister was the one who donated her living womb.
The unnamed recipient, who is 34 years old and married and is from England, reportedly went through a transplant procedure that lasted for nine hours, as reported by The Guardian on Wednesday.
The married woman was born with a rare condition, which meant that her natural womb was not fully developed when she was born. She conceived her child with the help of a donor womb provided by her sister, who was 40 years old at the time and already had two children of her own.
The recipient was born with Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome, a rare form of congenital reproductive disorder that affects only one in every 5,000 females. Those who are affected by this syndrome either do not have a womb or have a vagina that has not fully developed.
Isabel Quiroga, the co-lead surgeon and a consultant surgeon at the Oxford Transplant Centre, which is a part of the Oxford University hospitals, expressed that she was “thrilled” and “extremely proud” that the surgery had been successful.
In an operation that took place in February at the Churchill hospital in Oxford, the recipient, who lives in England and asked not to be identified, received the uterus that belonged to her sister. She was discharged from the hospital 10 days later after being in the hospital for a total of nine hours and twenty minutes after being able to recover sufficiently.
