Surgeons at India’s Galaxy Care Hospital have performed the nation’s first uterus transplant. The healthcare facility, located in the city of Pune, reported that they received inquiries about the procedure from nearly two dozen women in the day following the successful surgery, according to the Hindustan Times.
In the transplant surgery performed last week, a 43-year-old woman donated her uterus to her 21-year-old daughter. The younger woman was born without a uterus.
The complete procedure took approximately nine and a half hours.
“The procedure is difficult because multiple large arteries are to be joined there, and veins that are small and short,” explained Dr. Shailesh Puntambekar, medical director of Galaxy Care Hospital, according to CNN. “It is technically very tough.”
(Image credit: Galaxy Care Hospital)
Puntambekar said that most of the surgery to remove the donor uterus was achieved through minimally invasive methods.
“Around 80 percent of the retrieval of organ … was done laparoscopically and only towards the tail end of the surgery when we had to take out the organ … from donor’s body that we adopted open surgery method by taking a small incision so that vessels supplying blood to the uterus are not squeezed and damaged,” he said.
After establishing the medical first in India, Puntambekar and his team quickly delivered an encore. The second uterus transplant was performed within 48 hours of the first. A 24-year-old woman was given the uterus of her 45-year-old mother.
The hospital reported that all patients were recovering well. The women who were the recipients of the transplant organs were expected to stay in the hospital for 15 days following their respective procedures.
The patients are further instructed to wait a full year before trying to conceive, with physicians monitoring progress the whole time, making certain their bodies adjust to the transplants.
According to CNN, there have been a total of six babies born to women who underwent a uterus transplant procedure. Two of those infants were from the same mother.
