A team of doctors from Boston Children’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Doctors in the US have performed remarkable brain surgery on an unborn baby for the first time, saving it from suffering a deadly genetic disorder.
Babies being born with genetic disorders are a common occurrence around the world. This is one of the various complications that happen during pregnancy and sometimes it even happens naturally with no means to rectify the defective functioning of the brain. However, doctors in the US have performed remarkable brain surgery on an unborn baby for the first time, saving it from suffering a deadly genetic disorder.
Derek and Kenyatta Coleman married seven years ago and reside in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Kenyatta was pregnant with her second baby and told CNN, “Baby was doing well. The anatomy scan came back unremarkable. All of her biophysical profiles were all unremarkable.” The 36-year-old did not seem to find anything out of the ordinary and the couple even did genetic testing that showed the pregnancy as “low risk”.
Things started to look bad when Derek, 39 and Kenyatta went for their 30-week ultrasound and the doctor told the mother that “something wasn’t right in terms of the baby’s brain and also her heart was enlarged.” The baby was diagnosed with a vein of Galen malformation at 30 weeks.
According to Boston Children’s Hospital, rare blood vessel abnormality happens inside the brain in which the misshapen arteries connect directly with veins instead of the capillaries, slowing down the blood flow and causing high-pressure blood to rush into the brain.
This extra pressure can cause several health issues in the baby such as rushing blood towards the heart and lungs forcing it to work overtime. This can lead to congestive heart failure in some infants and rising blood pressure leading to pulmonary hypertension in others. It can also prevent the toddler’s brain from draining accurately leading to brain injury and sometimes loss of brain tissue. Sometimes the condition caused the development of hydrocephalus – an enlarged head.
A team of doctors from Boston Children’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital carried out the surgery on the fetus’s brain. They first cut into the womb and then the baby’s skull, ultimately operating on the developing brain. They used an ultrasound to locate the infant’s artery and help navigate the procedure. The surgery was successfully performed at 34 weeks and 2 days gestational age and has been documented in a case study published in the American Heart Association’s journal Stroke on Thursday.
The baby was born 2 days after the operation with no defects and limited complications. She weighed 1.9 kilograms which is a little lighter than a fully developed baby’s average weight between 2.7-4 kilograms.
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