Chinese Doctors Report Successful Penis Transplant

An article in a recent issue of European Urology, a medical journal published by the European Association of Urology, details the case of a successful penis transplant performed by doctors in China. A team of surgeons led by Dr. Hu Weilie at Guangzhou General Hospital performed the transplant a year ago, on a 44-year old man who had lost his penis. The report by the surgeons does not say specifically how the man lost his penis, but says only that "an unfortunate traumatic accident" left him with a small stump. He was unable to urinate or have sex normally.

Hu writes in the journal that "there was strong demand from both the patient and his wife" for the transplant to take place. He says that the surgery "was discussed again and again," and the transplant was approved by the ethics committee of the hospital. The donor penis came from a 22-year-old brain-dead man whose parents agreed to donate his organ.

The transplant surgery was a success, but just two weeks later the recipient and his wife requested that the new organ be removed "because of the wife’s psychological rejection as well as the swollen shape of the transplanted penis," according to the surgeons’ report. According to Dr. Yoram Vardi, who wrote a commentary accompanying the journal article, psychological issues involved in organ transplants of any kind are keenly important to pay attention to. Vardi, a neurology and urology specialist at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, said that if doctors had paid more attention to the need for counseling and psychological concerns surrounding the transplant, "the need for penile amputation could probably have been avoided."

Although a penis transplant may sound radical, the operation involves the same standard microsurgery techniques used in all transplant surgeries to reconnect blood vessels and nerves. Surgeons know from experiences with arm and leg reattachments that nerves regenerate at a rate of about one inch per month, and often never attain enough regrowth to allow normal use of the limb. However, the ethical and psychological challenges are often even more difficult to overcome.

The world’s first hand transplant recipient stopped taking immune suppression drugs shortly after receiving his new hand, and later requested that the hand be amputated. The world’s first double-hand transplant in France told doctors that it took months for him to eventually accept his new hands and stop referring to one of them as "it." From a medical point of view, the main hurdle is the functional recovery of a transplanted organ—but from the patient’s point of view, the main hurdle is usually a psychological one.