It has been over 18 months since Zion Harvey, 10, received two new hands as the youngest ever double-hand transplant recipient. In a newly published case study in The Lancet, the Baltimore boy’s doctors say his progress is beyond their expectations.
“Our patient is now able to write, dress and feed himself more independently and efficiently than he was before his operation,” Dr. Sandra Amaral, the medical director of the kidney and hand transplant program at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said in a Lancet podcast.
Dr. L. Scott Levin, the surgical director of the of the hand transplant program at the hospital, called Harvey’s progress “remarkable” in a one-year update on the hospital’s website.
“I don’t think we could have asked for a better outcome by this point, a better patient, a better family,” Levin told The Daily Mail.
The medical team that worked on Harvey’s transplant and rehabilitation said his case shows that this type of transplant is possible for children.
“We showed for the first time – with extensive planning, careful execution and supportive post-surgical therapies such as pediatric-specific physical and occupational therapy – hand transplantation from an unrelated donor can succeed in a child,” said Amaral.
One of the most important findings in Harvey’s case was that his brain could be retrained and remapped to recognize the new hands and command them to move.
“One promising and unique finding is how the patient’s brain adjusted to the presence of new hands six years after this child lost his hands to amputation at age two,” said Amaral. “We’re observing cortical remapping of the hands.”
“Someone can have primary learning in the brain even when this critical window of development didn’t happen since he was amputated prior to that,” she added.
There were unique conditions about Harvey’s case that likely helped make the procedure successful, said Amaral.
Because the boy was already on immunosuppressants (anti-rejection drugs) from an earlier kidney transplant, and because he and his family were familiar with the rigorous demands of post-operative therapy, doctors believe Harvey was better suited to cope with the transplant.
Since his operation, Harvey has been undergoing therapy for eight hours a day, five days a week. His medical team said he never once showed any resistance or negativity to their demands.
“In all transplantation there are ups and downs, but this is a very positive story – so much so that we had a bit of a moratorium with other children. We need to work slowly. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves,” said Levin. “But we are encouraged that it has been such a success and we are already evaluating many other children for the same procedure.”