2023-06-16 10:56:56
“A world first. » Surgeons from a French hospital have successfully operated on a fetus with a serious brain malformation, Paris hospitals announced on Friday June 16.
“An aneurysmal malformation of the Vein of Galen was treated by embolization in utero” in September 2022, reported in a press release the AP-HP, an organization on which the main public hospitals in Ile-de-France depend. In this case, it was at the Paris Necker hospital that surgeons performed this unprecedented operation, unveiled for the first time by The Parisian.
The first does not consist in operating on a baby in its mother’s womb. Many operations of this type have already been performed in recent years, especially for malformations of the spinal cord. But the intervention performed at Necker directly targeted the brain of the fetus.
This one was suffering from a malformation of the vein of Galen, a cerebral blood vessel. However, this problem very often risks leading to the death of the newborn or, subsequently, to serious sequelae. The operation represented in itself high risks, but it was proposed to the parents, in view of the virtual certainty of serious or fatal effects for the future child if the malformation had remained in the state.
The healthy child
The specificity of the operation also consists in its minimally invasive nature: “a microcatheter was positioned in the vein of Galen, through the skin and the uterus of the mother, then through the skull of the fetus”, explains the AP-HP. The operation went smoothly in half an hour and, above all, the child, now 8 months old, is doing well.
Meanwhile, in the United States, surgeons performed a similar operation in a Boston hospital. This one, carried out in March and also crowned with success, gave rise to a scientific publication, in the medical journal Stroke.
“This approach represents a paradigm shift” faced with this type of malformation, the researchers wrote there, noting that such an operation makes it possible to intervene at an early stage and before irreversible complications.
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