World’s first quadruple limb transplant performed in Ankara hospital

Surgeons at Hacettepe University Hospital in Ankara, Turkey, have today performed the world’s first ever quadruple limb transplant, attaching two arms and two legs to a young man.

The operation took 20 hours to complete and required 50 doctors to help attach the limbs.

Head physician Dr. Murat Tuncer today appealed for blood donations to overcome possible complications following the surgery.

Dr. Murat Tuncer did not provide any details about the patient.

The operation comes after a failed triple limb transplant two months ago at another hospital in the southern city of Antalya.

The doctors there were forced to remove a leg from a patient due to tissue incompatibility. The same patient also received two arms.

Dr. Murat Tuncer says his team also performed a separate face transplant on another patient yesterday – the second in Turkey this year.

The first in the country was performed on Turkish teenager Ugur Acar, who lost 70% of his face when he was just two-years-old in a TV tube explosion, at Akdeniz University’s School of Medicine in Antalya.

Doctors successfully transplanted tissue from the face of a 45-year-old donor to 19-year-old Ugur Acar in January but doctors have said he will not be able to make facial expressions for another six months.

Connie Culp, from America, was the first ever successful recipient of a face transplant, performed at the Cleveland Clinic in December 2008.

She was shot in the face by her husband Thomas Culp in a failed murder-suicide in September 2004 outside a bar in Hopedale, Ohio.