Woman gives birth from a uterus transplanted from her own mother

China Daily | Updated: 2019-01-25 07:23

XI'AN - A woman who received a transplanted uterus from her mother in November 2015 gave birth to a healthy baby boy in Shaanxi province on Sunday.

Weighing 2 kilograms and measuring 48 centimeters long, the child is China's first and the world's 14th baby born from a transplanted uterus, doctors at Xijing Hospital in Xi'an said on Wednesday.

Yang Hua, 26, the new mother, was born without a uterus but has her own ovaries.

Woman gives birth from a uterus transplanted from her own mother

When the mother-daughter transplant, China's first human uterus transplant, was done in 2015, Yang was 22 and her mother was 43.

Doctors extracted eggs from Yang and froze 14 embryos in August 2015.

One of those embryos was successfully implanted in Yang's new uterus in June. Yang was found to be pregnant after two weeks.

To ensure the health of Yang and the baby during the pregnancy, experts from the obstetrics and gynecology department and the urology department of the hospital made a series of individual immune anti-rejection medication plans and conducted regular ultrasound exams and blood plasma concentration and hormone monitoring.

"The full-term fetus would put pressure on the transplanted uterus, which would increase risks during labor," said Chen Biliang, director of the hospital's obstetrics and gynecology department.

It was decided to deliver the baby by cesarean section during the 33rd week of Yang's pregnancy.

Uterus transplants are not new. In the 1960s, Britain and the United States began to experiment with the procedure on animals. In 2000, the world's first human uterus transplant was done on a 26-year-old woman in Saudi Arabia. That uterus failed after three months and had to be removed.

In 2011, doctors successfully performed a uterus transplant on a woman in Turkey. Two years later, nine women in Sweden successfully received transplanted uteri donated by relatives.

Chen said uterus transplants remain a medical challenge because the uterus has plenty of tenuous blood vessels and is deep in the pelvic cavity. Therefore, a string of problems including cutting, the structure of the blood vessels during the transplant and strong rejection reactions may occur, according to Chen.

There are about a million women in China who are infertile because of their uteri. Due to the limitations of current assisted reproductive technology and the prohibition of surrogate motherhood in many countries, including China, uterus transplants have provided an effective way for women with uterine infertility to have their own babies, Chen said.

Xinhua