After the transplant
In a first, A hand transplant patient's new hands ended up turning the same color as the rest of her skin. The doctors stated that this is the first case of the intriguing health phenomenon.
21-year-old Shreya Siddanagowder was the first case of an inter-gender hand transplant in Asia, performed at the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences (AIMS). Her donor was a 20-year-old person from Kerala, who not only had a much darker skin tone but who was also a man.
She was involved in a bus accident in September 2016 that caused the amputation of both her hands. The hands originally belonged to a 20-year-old man from Kerala, who died in August 2017.
Shreya eventually underwent the operation, after finding a donor blood type compatible, in 2017 at the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences (AIMS) in Kochi.
Taking 13 hours, it was undertaken by a team of 20 surgeons and a 16-strong anaesthesia team and saw the hand attached by the bone, then arteries, veins and tendon muscles, before the skin was stitched to Shreya's upper limb.
Shreya then remained in Kochi for 18 months to undergo intensive physiotherapy, while gradually gaining nerve sensations in the hand.
More recently, the hand has lost some of its weight and started to look more like a natural fit to her body. More surprisingly, the originally dark-coloured hand has lightened in skin tone to match her skin colour.
“I don’t know how the transformation occurred. But it feels like my own hands now. The skin color was very dark after the transplant, not that it was ever my concern, but now it matches my tone,” the 21-year-old recipient claimed.
After the transplant
Siddanagowder’s mother added that she had noticed her daughter’s wrists appear to get smaller and she saw her fingers get thinner as the appendages lengthened in the months following the transplant.
Her hand's now
“We are recording the color change in [Shreya’s] case, but we need more evidence to understand the change in the shape of the fingers and hands,” said Dr. Subramania Iyer, head of plastic and reconstructive surgery at AIMS.
Although Siddanagowder’s hands might look close to normal, they do not always act that way. The 21-year-old recipient still undergoes physical therapy in the hopes of getting hand function back to 100 percent.
