First US face transplant recipient revealed

When her husband shot her five years ago, Connie Culp was left without a nose, a palate or lower eyelids, but on Tuesday she revealed her new face.

Ms Culp's was the world's first near-total facial transplant and the fourth known facial transplant to have been successfully performed to date.

The 46-year-old mother of two underwent a procedure last December that lasted 22 hours at the Cleveland Clinic in the state of Ohio.

Surgeons transplanted about 80 per cent of Ms Culp's face using facial tissue from a dead woman that was placed like a mask atop her own. Almost her entire face was replaced, except for the forehead, upper eyelids, lower lip and chin.

The team of 11 surgeons who performed the operation said Ms Culp, who was missing bone support and had been unable to eat or breathe without a tube in her windpipe, could now perform functions normally. But her face was bloated, drooping and her speech was at times difficult to decipher.

"We think this ... procedure has changed her life dramatically," Maria Siemionow, the clinic's director of plastic surgery research, told a news conference.

Her identity and the incident that had disfigured were kept under wraps until yesterday.

"Well, I guess I'm the one you came to see today," Ms Culp said after being helped up to the podium. But, she added, "I think it's more important that you focus on the donor family that made it so I could have this person's face."

When Risal Djohan, a plastic surgeon at the clinic, first looked at Ms Culp's injuries two months after she was shot, "he told me he didn't think, he wasn't sure, if he could fix me, but he'd try," the patient recalled.

"Here I am, five years later. He did what he said - I got me my nose," she said with a laugh.

Facial transplants are controversial because they carry heavy risks and are performed to improve a patient's quality of life rather than as a life-saving operation.

There are also concerns that the operation could eventually be used for purely cosmetic purposes or as a means of altering someone's identity.

Although the circumstances that led to Ms Culp's injury were not revealed at the news conference, local media reported that her husband, Thomas, had shot her in 2004 at point-blank range before turning the gun on himself. The apparent murder-suicide attempt failed and he was sentenced to seven years in prison.

A thoroughly disfigured Ms Culp went through 30 operations in an attempt to salvage her face before finally undergoing the transplant, which was also the first of its kind known to have included bones, along with muscle, skin, blood vessels and nerves.