Promising short term results raise an important question regarding its patient population—are centers that perform face transplantation effectively reaching individuals from the targeted facial disfigurement population? Our center reviewed our face transplantation contacts to assess patient recruitment and outreach performance.
Methods
We performed a retrospective review of subjects who requested screening for face transplantation (aka: “Contacts”) between the time of our IRB protocol approval (February 2008) to October 2015. We investigated the relationship between referral mode (physician vs self) with the Contact's demographic characteristics (age, gender, race, mechanism of injury, geographic location) and clinical trial status.
Results
There were a total of 72 face transplantation Contacts The average age of the Contacts was 38 years, and the majority of them were male (n = 41, 569%) The predominant race of Contacts was White (n = 33) and the most prevalent mechanism of injury was burns (n = 32) The majority of our Contacts resided within the US (n = 47), with the majority from the Northeastern US (n = 21) Of the 72 Contacts, 35 (486%) were physician referrals and 37 (514%) were self referrals Physician referrals led to the most screened and transplanted Contacts in our center, whereas self-referral often led to immediate exclusion.
Conclusions
In this study, we show the diversity of patient characteristics and referral patterns in our clinical trial Furthermore, we describe the relationship of characteristics to outcomes in our cohort and identify areas of improvement, such as patient and physician education. Lastly, we are reminded of face transplantation's potential impact.
Figure 1. Overall clinical status of contacts -no (%).
