(https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11165497/hairy-male-donor-hands-growing-lighter-hairless-match-female-amputee/)
>Doctors have been left baffled after an amputee's new hands miraculously changed to blend in with her body.
Shreya Siddanagowder didn't hesitate when she was offered new hands - even though they were big, dark and hairy, and once belonged to a man.
However, the hands have now become more slender and changed colour to match her skin tone - mystifying the doctors who carried out the rare 13-hour transplant.
>"The donor was a tall man with big spindly fingers," Shreya's mother Suma told AFP by phone from their home in Pune in western India.
>"Now nobody can make out that they are a man's hands... She has even started wearing jewellery and nail varnish."
Shreya's life was turned upside down in 2016 when, aged 18, she was involved in a bus accident that crushed both her arms. Eventually, the hospital obtained a pair of hands from a man in August 2017 and Shreya and her family accepted. The donor hands were first attached by the bones before the tendons, blood vessels and skin were painstakingly stitched together.
After the transplant, she had to undergo more than a year of physiotherapy for her body and brain to get used to the new hands and obtain mobility and sensation.
Iyer said that the colour of Shreya's hands quickly began to show "a lot of change", but that it is difficult to pinpoint why.
>"It could be because of MSH.... a brain-controlled hormone that stimulates melanin production. We are wondering if MSH levels can really influence the skin colour."
Shreya on her part is loving the transformation - she even wrote her recent college exam with her new hands - and so are her doctors.
Only 200 successful hand transplants have taken place worldwide - including nine in India - since the first in the United States in 1999 on a man whose left lower limb had been blown off by a firework.
>Doctors have been left baffled after an amputee's new hands miraculously changed to blend in with her body.
Shreya Siddanagowder didn't hesitate when she was offered new hands - even though they were big, dark and hairy, and once belonged to a man.
However, the hands have now become more slender and changed colour to match her skin tone - mystifying the doctors who carried out the rare 13-hour transplant.
>"The donor was a tall man with big spindly fingers," Shreya's mother Suma told AFP by phone from their home in Pune in western India.
>"Now nobody can make out that they are a man's hands... She has even started wearing jewellery and nail varnish."
Shreya's life was turned upside down in 2016 when, aged 18, she was involved in a bus accident that crushed both her arms. Eventually, the hospital obtained a pair of hands from a man in August 2017 and Shreya and her family accepted. The donor hands were first attached by the bones before the tendons, blood vessels and skin were painstakingly stitched together.
After the transplant, she had to undergo more than a year of physiotherapy for her body and brain to get used to the new hands and obtain mobility and sensation.
Iyer said that the colour of Shreya's hands quickly began to show "a lot of change", but that it is difficult to pinpoint why.
>"It could be because of MSH.... a brain-controlled hormone that stimulates melanin production. We are wondering if MSH levels can really influence the skin colour."
Shreya on her part is loving the transformation - she even wrote her recent college exam with her new hands - and so are her doctors.
Only 200 successful hand transplants have taken place worldwide - including nine in India - since the first in the United States in 1999 on a man whose left lower limb had been blown off by a firework.
