Woman has baby after womb transplant in world first: Lancet

PARIS - A 36-year-old Swede has become the world's first woman to give birth after receiving a womb transplant, medical journal The Lancet said on Saturday, describing the event as a breakthrough for infertile women.

The healthy baby boy was born last month, it said. Both mother and infant are doing well.

Weighing 1.775 kilos (3.9 pounds), the baby was born by Caesarean section at 31 weeks after the mother developed pre-eclampsia, a pregnancy condition, the journal said.

The woman had a genetic condition called Rokitansky syndrome which meant she was born without a womb, although her ovaries were intact.

The surgeons said the exploit smashes through the last major barrier of female infertility -- the absence of a uterus as a result of heredity or surgical removal for medical reasons.

"Absolute uterine factor infertility is the only major type of female infertility that is still viewed as untreatable," they said in a paper published by the British journal.

The replacement organ came from a 61-year-old woman, a close family friend who had been through menopause seven years earlier. The organ was transplanted in a 10-hour operation last year.

The recipient underwent in-vitro fertilization, in which eggs were harvested from her ovaries and fertilized using sperm from her partner, and then cryogenically preserved.

A year after the transplant, a single early-stage embryo was inserted into the transplanted womb. A pregnancy test three weeks later was positive.

The womb encountered a brief episode of rejection, but this was successfully tackled by increasing a dose of corticosteroid drugs to suppress the immune system.

- A decade of research -

"Our success is based on more than 10 years of intensive animal research and surgical training by our team and opens up the possibility of treating many young females worldwide that suffer from uterine infertility," the Lancet quoted Professor Matts Braennstroem of the University of Gothenburg, who led the operation, as saying.

"What is more, we have demonstrated the feasibility of live-donor uterus transplantation, even from a post-menopausal donor."

Rokitansky syndrome -- Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuester-Hauser syndrome to give it its full name -- affects approximately one in 4,500 newborn girls, previous research has found.

The options open to women with this disorder, or who have had a hysterectomy, are adoption or having a baby through a surrogate mother.

But surrogacy is not allowed in many countries because of ethical, legal or religious reasons.

The unnamed Swede was one of nine who received a uterus from live donors under Braennstroem's programme.

Two of them had to undergo hysterectomy within a few months, either because the womb became infected or blood flow to it became clotted, the paper said.

The other seven women began menstruation during the first two to three months, and the transplanted organs remained viable during the first year after the operation.

Two other transplant attempts have been reported elsewhere, but neither resulted in a live birth.

The first, carried out in Saudi Arabia in 2000, ended in failure after three months when the uterus became necrotic and had to removed.

The second, carried out in Turkey in 2011, entailed a uterus that was transplanted from a deceased donor, resulting in pregnancies that miscarried within six weeks.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Curbing bad habits can stop 37M premature deaths: study

PARIS - Curbing smoking and drinking, salt intake, high blood pressure, high blood sugar and obesity can prevent more than 37 million premature deaths by 2025, according to an analysis published on Saturday.

If globally-adopted targets for reducing these risk factors are met, the risk of dying prematurely from heart or lung disease, stroke, cancer or diabetes will fall by 22 percent in men and 19 percent for women in 2025, compared with 2010, a team of researchers wrote in The Lancet medical journal.

"Worldwide, this improvement is equivalent to delaying or preventing at least 16 million deaths in people aged 30-70 years and 21 million in those aged 70 years or older over 15 years," they said.

The targets are to reduce tobacco use by 30 percent, alcohol consumption by 10 percent, salt intake by 30 percent, high blood pressure by 25 percent, and to halt the rise in the prevalence of obesity and diabetes.

A more ambitious 50-percent reduction in smoking by 2025 would reduce the risk by more than 24 percent in men and by 20 percent in women, wrote the team.

They used national population data and epidemiological models for their calculations.

"Most of the benefits will be seen in low-income and middle-income countries where as many as 31 million deaths could be prevented," said co-author Majid Ezzati from Imperial College London.

Not reaching the targets would result in 38.8 million premature deaths in 2025 alone -- 10.5 million more than in 2010, the team said.

Premature mortality is defined for the purposes of the study as the probability of dying between the ages of 30 and 70.

The United Nations is targeting a 25-percent reduction in premature death from non-communicable diseases from 2010 to 2025.

This group of diseases is caused in large part by unhealthy lifestyles, including tobacco use, physical inactivity, the harmful use of alcohol and unhealthy diets.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Stemcell-seeded windpipe patient healthy: report

PARIS - A woman who received a donor windpipe seeded with her own stem cells in groundbreaking surgery five years ago is healthy, said a report Wednesday, hailing progress in tissue engineering.

Donor windpipes are often rejected by the recipient's immune system, while patients also suffer the uncontrolled die-off of cells, called necrosis, and bleeding.

But having the stem cells come from the patient reduces the risk of attack by the immune system.

The procedure performed on Claudia Castillo involved removing the cells from a section of donor windpipe and grafting cartilage cells grown from her own stem cells onto it, as well as other cells taken from a healthy part of her windpipe.

"The recipient continues to enjoy a good quality of life, and has not experienced any immunological complications or rejection of the implanted airway," said a report published in The Lancet medical journal.

Castillo, then 30, had suffered from tuberculosis and received a new lease on life with the transplant.

She was discharged from hospital 10 days after the operation, but researchers said only a long-term follow-up of the patient could show how succesful the operation had been.

Now the surgical team, led by Paolo Macchiarini from Stockholm's Karolinska University Hospital, reports that the patient continues to enjoy "a normal social and working life".

"Moreover, regular testing of lung function, immunological response to the transplant, and other key indicators reveal that the recipient has retained good lung function and has not experienced any immunological complications."

Castillo had suffered some scarring around the graft area, which led to a narrowing of part of the airway and a persistent cough.

This was fixed with a stent -- a scaffold that holds the airway open, said a statement.

"These results confirm what we, and many patients, hoped at the time of the original operation: that tissue engineered transplants are safe and effective in the long term," Macchiarini added.

In a comment on the publication, Alan Russell of the Allegheny Health Network in Pittsburgh said this was "the end of the beginning for tissue engineering".

In 2011, a 36-year-old Eritrean received the world's first transplant of an artificial windpipe seeded with his own stem cells.

Stem cells are immature cells that can differentiate into the specialized cells that comprise and maintain the human body.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com