A Massachusetts man can speak again after surgeons removed his cancerous voice box and replaced it with a donated one, a pioneering move
In this photo provided by the Mayo Clinic, Dr. Girish Mour, left, medical director of Mayo Clinic's Larynx and Trachea Transplant Program, and Dr. David Lott, right, standing on either side of Marty Kedian one week after his transplant surgery in Phoenix, March 8, 2024. Kedian regained his voice after surgeons removed his cancerous larynx and, in a pioneering move, immediately replaced it with a donated one.
“People need to keep their voice,” Kedian, 59, told The Associated Press four months after his transplant – still hoarse but able to keep up an hourlong conversation. “I want people to know this can be done.” “Patients become very reclusive, and very kind of walled off from the rest of the world,” said Dr. David Lott, Mayo’s chair of head and neck surgery in Phoenix. He started the study because “my patients tell me, ‘Yeah I may be alive but I’m not really living.’”The larynx may be best known as the voice box but it’s also vital for breathing and swallowing.
Although the earlier U.S. recipients achieved near normal speech, doctors haven’t embraced these transplants. Partly that’s because people can survive without a larynx – while antirejection drugs that suppress the immune system could spark new or recurring tumors. “It isn’t a ‘one-off,’” but an opportunity to finally learn from one patient before operating on the next, said Dr. Marshall Strome, who led the 1998 transplant in Cleveland.Other options are being studied, noted Dr. Peter Belafsky of UC Davis, who helped perform the 2010 transplant. His patients at high risk of larynx loss record their voice in anticipation of next-generation speech devices that sound like them.
Still the once gregarious Kedian, known for long conversations with strangers, wouldn't let doctors remove his entire larynx to cure the cancer. He desperately wanted to read bedtime stories to his granddaughter, with his own voice rather than what he called robotic-sounding speech devices.
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