News | Surgical Procedures
Replantation Surgery: Are we progressing or regressing?

By Kerry Breen

Edited By Allison Elyse Gualtieri

/ CBS New

Read the article on CBS News

Tyler Theroux came into the world with a brachial plexus birth injury that kept his left arm dysfunctional and contorted in pain. As a child, he couldn’t engage in playground activities like the monkey bars, and his classmates would bully him about the injury.

Eventually, Theroux dropped out of school to be homeschooled. While the teasing stopped, the pain didn’t: His parents watched him experience fresh agony with every growth spurt. The brachial plexus is the group of nerves that sends signals from the spinal cord to the shoulder, arm and hand, and that nerve pain kept him awake at night, despite multiple attempts at surgery and therapeutic treatment.

graph of success rate of replantation

What does the results say?

The decades that followed, however, showed a stable field lacking any significant changes or advancements. More recently, and especially in the United States, the frequency with which surgeons even attempt replantation and the rate of survival have plummeted. If this trend continues, successful replantation surgery will become all too rare of an event. It is critical that we evaluate the state of replantation surgery today, identify the primary causes, and work to not only revive the field but allow it to advance similar to other areas of medicine.

This is an abstract of an article published on www.parjournal.net by Dr Jacques Hacquebord and Karen Noh.

Read the full article here

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