Doctors in the US say most of the face transplant patients they have been following for about five years are continuing to show improvement in quality of life.

Their new faces are functioning — in terms of movement control — at about 60% of what a normal face would, and the patients are seeing “significant improvement” in the ability to feel hot, cold and pressure on the skin.

“For some of them, you would not be able to tell (they had a transplant),” said Dr Bohdan Pomahac, director of plastic surgery transplantation at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, which is at the forefront of face transplantation.

“Some of them don’t look normal, but they look human. But if you look at them before and after, it’s night and day.”