A woman in the United Kingdom has become the recipient of the world’s first womb transplant, which was performed by surgeons there.
The living womb donor turned out to be the woman’s sister.
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 woman who is already married was born with a rare condition that caused her to be born without a fully developed womb. Her sister, who was 40 years old at the time and already had two children of her own, agreed to be a womb donor for her.
The recipient was born with Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome, a congenital reproductive disorder that is extremely rare and affects only one in every 5,000 females. Those who are affected by this syndrome either lack 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 hospitals affiliated with Oxford University, expressed that she was “thrilled” and “extremely proud” that the operation had been successful.
The recipient, who resides in England and requested that her identity not be revealed, had surgery in February at Churchill hospital in Oxford to receive the uterus that belonged to her sister. She was discharged from the hospital 10 days later after having been in the hospital for a total of nine hours and twenty minutes.
