Face Transplants Promised Hope. Patients Were Put Through the Unthinkable (theguardian.com)

(Thursday November 27, 2025 @04:00PM (msmash) from the more-than-skin-deep dept.)

Twenty years after surgeons in France performed the world's first face transplant, the experimental field that procedure launched is now [1]confronting a troubling record of patient deaths , buried negative data and a healthcare system that leaves recipients financially devastated and medically vulnerable.

About 50 face transplants have been performed globally since Isabelle Dinoire received her partial face graft at University Hospital CHU Amiens-Picardie in November 2005. A 2024 JAMA Surgery study reported five-year graft survival of 85% and 10-year survival of 74%, concluding that the procedure is "an effective reconstructive option for patients with severe facial defects." The study did not track psychological wellbeing, financial outcomes, employment status or quality of life. Roughly 20% of face transplant patients have died from rejection, kidney failure, or heart failure.

The anti-rejection medications that keep transplanted faces alive can destroy kidneys and weaken immune systems to the point where routine infections become life-threatening. In the United States, the Department of Defense has funded most operations, treating them as a frontier for wounded veterans, because private insurers refuse to cover the costs. Patients who survive the surgery often find themselves unable to afford medications, transportation to follow-up appointments or basic caregiving. The field's long-term grants cover surgical innovation but not the lifelong needs of the people who receive these transplants.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/nov/27/face-transplant-patients-results-outcomes

Great. Just great. (Score:2)

by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 )

We've seen how this movie ends, yet they're still pursuing this?

Unthinkable (Score:4, Insightful)

by TwistedGreen ( 80055 )

Well all I can say is that I hope I never have to consider undergoing such a procedure. My sympathies to those who suffer as a result. It sounds like it's nothing like they portrayed in the movie Face/Off.

I hate this cliche. (Score:1)

by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 )

I suspect that it's more symptom than cause, and probably not at the top of the list of causes; but I cannot overstate how much I loathe the hyperbolic use of the term 'unthinkable' in these sorts of situations. Both because it's false; and because it often acquires a sort of implicitly exculpatory implication that is entirely undeserved.

Not only is it 'thinkable'; having something awful happen when you perform a procedure that requires longterm hardcore immunosuppression and then let them follow through

Re: (Score:2)

by test321 ( 8891681 )

TFA focuses on what it feels like to live with someone else's face. I believe this part is the unthinkable. It might look logical after the fact, but would have been hard to anticipate. Like touching the inner part of your face with the tongue and finding the feeling "horrible".

Here a very partial selection that illustrates my point:

> Isabelle felt less like a princess than a circus animal. After the transplant, she spoke of being tormented: “Everyone would say: Have you seen her? It’s her. It’s her And so I stopped going out completely.”

> Living with a stranger’s face was as psychologically difficult as ethicists feared. Two years after the transplant she spoke to the strangeness of having “someone else’s” mouth. “It was odd to touch it with my tongue. It was soft. It was horrible.”

> And then one day she found a new hair on her chin – “It was odd. I’d never had one. I thought, ‘It’s me that has given it life, but the hair is hers.’”

> after each psychiatric appointment, she would come home “at the lowest, full of guilt and suicidal desires”. More than once, according to her, she attempted suicide after her transplant;

> Isabelle never resumed a normal life, never returned to work or good mental health, and from 2013 experienced regular episodes of rejection.

> She died in 2016

There are similar story of people who psychologically rejected their new hand after a transplant as "someone else's hand" is too hard of a burden, something they couldn't imagin

Silence of the lambs (Score:1)

by flyingfsck ( 986395 )

There was a book and a movie about face transplants