The first U.S. medical facility to perform a uterus transplant will be the Cleveland Clinic. Women with infertility associated with uterine problems can now dream of being pregnant and having their own children. The procedure has been performed successfully in Sweden with several births.

When the first birth from a woman with transplanted uterus was announced, a coalition was created between hospitals and universities in Sweden in September 2014. Cleveland Clinic said that nine uterus transplants have yielded five pregnancies and four live births. The babies were born healthy but premature.

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The clinic also mentioned that women with uterine-caused infertility have no option of getting pregnancy. Some women are born with no uterus, others lose their uterus or have no functionable uterus. Thousands of women are believed to suffer from uterus problems across the world, and as a result, they cannot have their own children.

The lead investigator Andreas Tzakis, M.D. claims that what makes the uterus transplant different from other transplants is that it is not expected to last the duration of a recipient's lifetime, meaning life-enhancing not life-saving. It will be maintained for only as long as is necessary to produce one or two children so that taking transplant anti-rejection drugs will be stopped.

Tzakis also added that due to personal, cultural or religious reasons, some women cannot adopt or have surrogates. At a Cleveland Clinic hospital in Weston, Florida, he is the director of solid organ transplant surgery.

Uterine transplantation is a new frontier in reproductive medicine and transplant surgery fields. This procedure may be a potential treatment for uterine-caused infertility, but is still considered highly experimental.

The transplant surgery takes about five hours. Patients will have to wait for a year for the healing process with adjustments on the doses of anti-rejection drugs before trying to become pregnant. One embryo at a time is transplanted in the uterus until the recipient is pregnant. To protect the transplanted uterus from the strain of labor, a caesarean section is performed to deliver the baby.

Facing the risks of surgery is a potential danger for uterus recipients. Such pregnancies are also considered high-risk because fetuses are exposed to the recipient's anti-rejection drugs and develop inside a womb that is taken from another patient.

Two earlier attempts were made in Saudi Arabia and in Turkey but failed. Other hospitals in Britain and United States are also preparing to try the surgery.

Tagscleveland clinic, uterine transplantaton, infertile women, Pregnancy, reproductive medicine, transplant surgery, uterine transplant, anti-rejection drugs