“Do you have children? You would do the same”. If it was obvious for Patricia, it was a little less so in French law. As related Nice morningthis 55-year-old mother allowed her 20-year-old daughter, a rugby player, to heal her umpteenth ruptured anterior cruciate ligament by giving her a patellar tendon.
An unprecedented transplant, a world first carried out at the Institute of Sports Medicine and Surgery in Monaco, which will allow young Katia to “recover faster” and “avoid certain operations” thanks to the donation received from her mother.
An operation financed by the Principality
From a living donor, it is only possible to remove a kidney, a lung lobe or liver. This transplant is therefore not authorized in France. The family, with the help of Professor Christophe Trojani and the lawyer Me André Bezzina, nevertheless tried by seizing the Biomedicine Agency and the Regional Health Agency (ARS), which firmly refused that the operation had place, even with the agreement of the Court of Justice of Nice. They then turned to Monaco.
It was ultimately the Monegasque Department of Social Affairs and Health and the Monegasque Biomedical Research Ethics Advisory Committee that gave favorable opinions for the intervention to be carried out, specifies the regional daily. The Principality also fully financed the operation, since it was not reimbursed on the other side of the border.
According to Nice morning, the two women are recovering well from this allograft, which is considered simple from a medical point of view. They will have to perform “a CT scan and a control MRI in two months to ensure this success”, Professor Christophe Trojani told the newspaper. For the specialist, if this successful allograft from a living donor is confirmed, it “could represent real progress […] and consider themselves as first intentions”.