ثاني عملية زراعة للوجه في فرنسا (الثالثة عالمياً)

PARIS (Reuters) - A man with a disfiguring disease has become the third person to have a partial face transplant, the second such operation in France in just over a year, doctors said on Tuesday.

The man, 29, suffered from von Recklinghausen disease, an illness that deforms the face, and was given a new nose, mouth and chin. Pictures of him were not released nor was he named.

Le Parisien daily had said earlier the man was 27.

A team of doctors in the Val-de-Marne near Paris carried out the 15-hour operation on Sunday.

"The patient is currently doing well," Laurent Lantieri, the surgeon who led the operation, told a news conference.

"The lesion is as bad as Elephant Man's," he later told reporters, a reference to a figure in Victorian Britain whose head ballooned outwards until his skull was wider than his waist.

The world's first partial face transplant was carried out on French woman Isabelle Dinoire in November 2005 after she was disfigured in an attack by her own dog.

In April last year, Chinese doctors said they had also performed a partial face transplant on a 30-year-old who was attacked by a bear.

"We will have to wait many months to see the results," Lantieri said, highlighting the danger that the patient's body would reject the new face.

the source