For the first time in the world, doctors succeeded in performing an operation on the brain of a fetus in its mother’s womb to treat a rare medical condition, which opens the door to treat similar cases in the future.
Al-Hurra quoted the Science Alert website as saying that surgeons at Boston Children’s Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts used a surgical technique to treat a malformation known as “Gallen vein malformation”, which causes heart failure and stroke-like symptoms after birth, reports Al-Rai daily.
Using ultrasound, doctors were able to treat the deformity, which causes blood to flow too quickly through part of the brain, the first such condition to be treated in this way.
After the operation and birth, the infant did not experience as much blood flow as it usually does for those with a deformity, says Darren Auerbach, a neuroradiologist from Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
Orbach revealed that the infant is now in the sixth week, does not take any medications, eats normally, gains weight, and does not suffer from any negative effects on her brain.
According to the Science Alert website, Galenic malformation affects about 1 in every 60,000 infants, and it is a rare type of vascular malformation in the brain that causes arteries to connect directly to veins instead of capillaries, making blood flow much faster.
Orbach and his colleagues performed the operation on a fetus at 34 weeks of gestation, and used ultrasound to guide them through the operation.
Because the birth was premature, the infant was transferred to the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit for several weeks, during which time doctors continued to monitor his brain.