First womb transplant carried out in UK

Surgeons in the United Kingdom have successfully performed the world’s first womb transplant on a female patient.

Living womb donation was performed by the woman’s sister.

The transplant procedure that the unnamed recipient from England, who is 34 years old and married, underwent lasted for nine hours, as reported by The Guardian on Wednesday.

The married woman was born with a rare condition, which meant that her original womb was not fully developed when she was born. She obtained a donor womb from 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, an extremely uncommon form of congenital reproductive disorder that affects only one in every 5,000 females. People who have this syndrome either do not have a womb or their vagina is 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 surgery had been successful.

An operation was performed in February at Churchill hospital in Oxford to give the recipient, who lives in England and asked not to be identified, the uterus that belonged to her sister. She was discharged from the hospital 10 days later after being stable for nine hours and twenty minutes of treatment.