Surgeons Use Bone of Cadaver to Save Boy’s Cancerous Arm

Surgeons used a bone from a cadaver to save the cancerous right arm of a 6-year-old boy in a pioneering transplant that will enable the limb to grow as he does.

Nine months after the surgery, Adam Johnson used the arm to toss a baseball at a news conference Monday at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital.

In September, doctors removed most of Adam’s humerus, the upper arm bone, because of a tumor. The doctors then replaced it by taking the humerus from a dead child and fusing it with a piece of Adam’s fibula, the thin bone that runs from the knee to the ankle.

Cadaver bones are commonly used in transplant surgery. But surgeons said this is the first time a live bone with its blood supply intact was combined with a cadaver bone so that the transplant would grow with the patient.

Adam, who lives in Nassau, Bahamas, will have a full-size arm when he grows up, surgeons said. If he had received only a cadaver bone, he would forever have the arm of a little boy.

In extremely rare circumstances, surgeons have successfully transplanted part of a patient’s fibula to another part of the body, fusing it to healthy tissue in the cancer-ravaged bone. The procedure was developed in Italy.

However, the fibula can fracture because of its narrow diameter.

In Adam’s case, the surgeons formed a composite: They used part of Adam’s fibula, with its blood supply and growth cartilage intact, and a cadaver bone to add strength and stability. A titanium plate holds the leg bone and cadaver bone together.

The new procedure is “a spinoff of the techniques used in Italy. It’s not anything necessarily new and different, but it’s really a new twist on old ideas. The combination is really the key,” said Dr. Mark Thomas Scarborough, a member of the surgical team.