Surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic have performed the nation’s first partial face transplant. The patient was a woman whose name and age were not released because her family wanted the reason for her transplant to remain confidential, health officials said. Doctors said they would discuss the surgery at a news conference on Wednesday.

The surgery was performed two weeks ago by a team of eight surgeons at the Cleveland, Ohio, hospital. The procedure involved using facial tissue from a dead woman with permission from her family.

The surgery performed at Cleveland Clinic was the first of this type done in the United States. The operation was carried out by Dr. Maria Siemionow. Siemionow and her colleagues spent years preparing for the surgery; they practiced on animals and did trial runs on 20 cadavers.

Three partial face transplants have been performed since 2005: two have been done in France and one in China. In 2005, a team of French doctors performed the world’s first partial face transplant of a 38-year-old patient whose face was disfigured when she was attacked by a dog. Reconstructive surgeons used donor tissue to replace her nose, mouth, lips and chin.

“I have a face like everyone else,” Isabelle Dinoire said at her first news conference since the surgery.

In 2006, Chinese doctors performed a partial face transplant on a farmer who lost much of the right side of his face in a bear attack.

The transplant poses a number of problems such as facing the difficulties of a life with disfigurement. In Dr. Siemionow’s face transplant book, entitled “Transplanting a Face: Notes on a Life in Medicine,” the renowned surgeon reveals her experience in the field of facial transplant surgery and tries to offer a balanced approach to physical and social-emotional future development of people who have face transplant surgeries. “Those who suffered extensive damage to their faces would forever be socially crippled in a society that appears to value beauty above all other human characteristics,” Dr. Siemionow writes in her book. Readers have the chance to understand the emotional impact of preparing to receive another’s face and to follow the planning of a procedure that has never been before attempted. In a previous interview at the Cleveland Clinic, she noticed that people horribly disfigured have few alternative therapies. She has considered dozens of potential candidates and said she would choose someone severely disfigured as her first patient.

For her research on facial transplant, Dr. Siemionow received the 2007 James Barrett Brown Award from the American Association of Plastic Surgeons.

A face transplant is still considered an experimental procedure to replace all or a part of a person’s face. The procedure consists in transplanting tissue from one person to another, but it may pose some health threats as the organism of the patient has the tendency to reject the foreign tissue. All transplant patients must take special drugs that suppress their immune system so their bodies won’t reject the donor tissue. Experts also warn of possible psychological side-effects associated with transplant surgery, which may include remorse, or problems of dealing with a new identity.