Transplants of hand and face should be considered organs

The US government is preparing to regulate the new field of hand and face transplants like it does standard organ transplants, giving more Americans who are disabled or disfigured by injury, illness, or combat a chance at this radical kind of reconstruction, Newsmax Health reports. "Joe Blow is not going to know that now an organ is defined as also including a hand or a face," said Suzanne McDiarmid, M.D., who chairs the committee of the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, that will develop the new policies over the next few months.

These so-called "reconstructive transplants" are experimental, and rare.

But they're gradually increasing as more U.S. hospitals offer the complex surgeries, the Defense Department funds research into the approach for wounded veterans, and as transplant recipients go public to say how the surgeries have improved their lives.

 "These hands are blessed hands to me," said Lindsay Aronson Ess, 30, of Richmond, Va., who received a double hand transplant in 2011. She had lost her hands and feet to a life-threatening infection in 2007.

In July, government regulations go into effect making hand and face transplants subject to the same strict oversight by UNOS, which manages the U.S. transplant program, as heart or kidney transplants. They're part of a new definition of "organ" that also includes other body parts that doctors one day might transplant, from feet to voice boxes, maybe even the uterus. Unlike corneas, heart valves and other simpler tissues that are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, these are all complex mixes of blood vessels, nerves, muscles and other tissues.

 The rules mean potential recipients will be added to the UNOS network, for matching of donated hands and face tissue that are the right tissue type and compatible for skin color, size, gender and age. Transplants and their outcomes will be tracked.

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