A patient regains the use of speech after a larynx transplant

The intervention, carried out for the first time in France, took place at the beginning of September. It lasted 27 hours in total.

“My daughters had never heard me speak.” A woman’s voice covered after the first larynx transplant in France, an intervention presented Monday, November 20 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, volunteered ten years ago, “to return to a normal life”.

Aged 49, she had been breathing through a tracheotomy for around twenty years, without being able to speak. The cause was complications linked to intubation after a cardiac arrest in 1996. A few days after the transplant, 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.

The idea for this procedure arose during the world’s first larynx transplant, carried out in 1998 in Cleveland (United States), on a man who had lost his vocal cords in a motorcycle accident. Professor Philippe Céruse, currently head of the ENT and head and neck surgery department at the Croix-Rousse hospital, met a Colombian colleague in 2010 who reproduced this very delicate transplant. The idea of ​​a larynx transplant germinated in his mind at that time.

Soon uterus and penis transplants?

For the next decade, the surgeon trained with a team of experts, obtained approvals, and began looking for eligible patients. In 2019, “Karine” was identified. But the Covid-19 pandemic 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.

Finally, on September 1, the long-awaited intervention took place in France. It will last 27 hours in total, around ten for the collection and 17 for the transplantation. Twelve surgeons and around fifty staff from the Lyon University Hospital took part in this first under the coordination of Professor Céruse and his colleague Lionel Badet, head of the urology and transplant surgery department at the Edouard-Herriot hospital.

It will be necessary to wait a full year to ensure the definitive success of the transplantation, but Professor Céruse “I think I can say that there will be others” larynx transplants in Lyon. Professor Badet recalls having participated in this “adventure of transplantation” which opens up to new specialties. And to project that after the arms, the forearms and the larynx, tomorrow it would be the turn of the “uterus and penis transplants”.