An American soldier injured in an IED attack has regained near-normal functions more than a year after receiving the world’s first penis and scrotum transplant.

The army veteran, who uses the pseudonym Ray, said he was "feeling whole".

He was operated on in March 2018 at the pioneering John Hopkins School of Medicine. He had been injured while serving in Afghanistan in 2010.

On Thursday his medical team reported that Ray’s life has been transformed by the surgery.

“He has near-normal erections and the ability to achieve orgasm,” they wrote, in a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

They said that Ray can also urinate standing up and without straining, “with the urine discharged in a strong stream.”