Cancer patient able to speak again after rare voice box transplant

A Massachusetts man has regained his voice after surgeons removed his cancerous larynx and, in a pioneering move, replaced it with a donated one.

A Massachusetts man has regained his voice after surgeons removed his cancerous larynx and, in a pioneering move, replaced it with a donated one.

Transplants of the so-called voice box are extremely rare and normally aren’t an option for people with active cancer. Marty Kedian is only the third person in the U.S. ever to undergo a total larynx transplant – the others, years ago, because of injuries – and one of a handful reported worldwide.

Surgeons at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona offered Kedian the transplant as part of a new clinical trial aimed at opening the potentially life-changing operation to more patients, including some with cancer, the most common way to lose a larynx.

“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.”

He became emotional recalling the first time he phoned his 82-year-old mother after the surgery “and she could hear me. … That was important to me, to talk to my mother.”

The study is small — just nine more people will be enrolled. But it may teach scientists best practices for these complex transplants so that one day they could be offered to more people who can’t breathe, swallow or speak on their own because of a damaged or surgically removed larynx.

“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. Muscular tissue flaps called vocal cords open to let air into the lungs, close to prevent food or drink from going the wrong way – and vibrate when air pushes past them to produce speech.