The world’s first face transplant recipient is using her new lips to take up smoking again, which doctors fear could interfere with her healing and raise the risk of tissue rejection.
“It is a problem,” Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard, who led the team that performed the pioneering transplant in France on Nov. 27, acknowledged on Wednesday.
The woman’s French surgeons made their first scientific presentation on the partial face transplant at a medical conference in Tucson this week, the 6th International Symposium on Composite Tissue Allotransplantation.