A ten-man team of medical doctors has performed the first-ever brain surgery on a baby with a deadly genetic disorder while it is still inside the mother’s womb.
The yet-to-be-born baby was diagnosed with a vein of Galen malformation at 30 weeks.
Children born with this kind of condition have a 30 per cent chance of dying before age 11.
The condition, which affects one in 60,000 babies, occurs when arteries in the brain drain blood directly into the veins instead of capillaries. This floods the heart with blood and could lead to dangerously high blood pressure.
The First-ever brain surgery which involved cutting into the womb, the baby’s skull, and then operating on the developing brain was carried out by a ten-man team of doctors at the Boston Children’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, United States.
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According to Daily Mail, the operation was performed by slicing into the pregnant woman’s abdomen and using an ultrasound to identify the artery and guide the surgery.
After the operation, the woman gave birth to a healthy baby boy two days later without birth defects.
A cardiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, Dr Gary Satou, said researchers were working with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to perform trials on the surgery’s safety and effectiveness.
“The fetal intervention team at Boston Children’s Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have successfully devised another in utero procedure that may be very impactful,” Satou, who was not involved in the research, said.
The surgery was documented in a case study published on Wednesday, May 3, in the American Heart Association’s journal Stroke.
The child was born with limited complications at 4.2 pounds – light for a newborn baby.
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