Double hand transplant patient shows new hands

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September 2, 2010

Associated Press Thu Sep 02, 2010, 01:02 PM CDT

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Richard Edwards said Thursday he can wiggle the fingers on the two new hands he received in a rare double hand tranplant at a hospital in Louisville.

It has been just a week since his badly burned hands were removed and donor hands were attached during a nearly 18-hour surgery at Jewish Hospital, the site of the world’s first successful hand transplant over a decade ago.

“I feel fantastic, I really do,” Edwards said after walking into a news conference with his team of doctors on Thursday.

Doctors say his ability to move fingers puts Edwards ahead of other hand tranplant recipients, who took months of therapy to gain significant movement.

At one point, the lead surgeon, Dr. Warren Breidenbach, asked Edwards to attempt to make a fist with his right hand.

“He’s getting a good, half-fist on that side,” Breidenbach said. “This is the result you’d expect, at six months (of therapy).”

The 55-year-old chiropractor from Edmond, Okla., had his hands severely burned in a brush fire in 2006. He lost seven fingers and said he sunk into depression and his life “came to a standstill” after losing the use of both hands.

Dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts and heavy braces on both arms, Edwards appeared ebullient on Thurday while speaking to reporters alongside his wife. He said he looks forward to gaining sensation back in his hands.

“I loved to hold my wife’s hand and feel her skin, and I want to do that again,” Edwards said.

Doctors say Edwards’ progress is ahead of other patients because they were able to route his existing nerves into the donor hands. Previous hand transplant patients had lost their hands or were amputees whose nerves had been severed.

“What is a breakthrough here is that this is the first time that a transplant has been done where we have allowed the tissue in the patient’s hand to stay present to put into the hand that’s coming,” Breidenbach said. “We took the parts we didn’t need and kept the parts we did.”

Edwards remarked that his new transplants resembled his original hands before they were burned.

“They look just like my hands,” he told one of his doctors Thursday.

Edwards is the nation’s third double hand transplant recipient. The first two were performed at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Several others have been done elsewhere, and even more single hand transplants have been performed.

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Double hand transplant patient shows new hands

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