A pair of Serbian twins underwent six hours of surgery last Tuesday, to give the twin born without testicles one of his brother's.
According to a recent report by the New York Times, the 36-year-old received a transplant from his identical twin brother in a procedure in Belgrade, Serbia, thanks to the efforts of an international team of surgeons.
The surgical team operated on the brothers simultaneously, with the two operations occurring in conjoined rooms. Doctors had the challenge of painstakingly sewing together two arteries and two veins less than two millimeters wide.
Check out this unbelievable video of two twins fighting each other in the womb:According to Dr. Dicken Ko, a transplant surgeon and urology professor at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston who flew to Belgrade to help conduct the surgery, the operation was performed to give the brother without testes the opportunity to father children.
Dr. Ko added that the surgery was a complete success and that both brothers (whose identities have not yet been made public) are fine and recuperating. The two men have been sharing a hospital room, and are expected to go home sometime this weekend.
Meanwhile, fellow surgeon Dr. Branko Bojovic, an expert in microsurgery at Harvard Medical School, stated: "Once you remove the testicle from the donor, the clock starts ticking very fast. Within two to four hours, you have to have it re-perfused and working again."
The first-ever testicle transplant was reported in a medical journal published in 1978. In that case, the twin brothers were 30 when they consulted Sherman J. Silber, a fertility specialist in St. Louis, who had received a testicle donation from a gay man. The transplant was a success, and the recipient eventually went on to father a total of five children.
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