2023-06-18 07:50:23
On September 8, a medical team from the Necker hospital managed to operate on an aneurysm, a fetus still in its mother’s womb, a world first.
The parents had “three choices”, the doctors told them. “Either you decide to have an abortion, or you give birth and there is a risk to the heart, or we try the operation”, tells BFMTV Marco Da Costa, the father of Lisandro, suffering from a rare malformation, Galen’s aneurysm when he was just a fetus.
It is at the third ultrasound that Lisandro’s parents learn of the malformation from which their future child suffers, who has only a 10% chance of survival, according to the doctors.
A brain the size of a “tiny walnut”
But the parents decide to try the operation in utero. This one, which takes place on September 8, 2022 at the Necker hospital in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, mobilizes around twenty specialists.
This is not the first time that doctors have performed an operation on a fetus, in the womb of its mother, but it is the first in the context of an aneurysm of the vein of Galen, a very rare malformation of the networks blood located in the brain which affects only about ten people per year.
And if the operation is delicate, it is because the fetus, 33 weeks old at that time, “weighs between 2.5 kilos and 2.7 kilos”, explains to BFMTV Olivier Naggara, the neuroradiologist who operated the baby. “His brain, and the malformation inside it, is the size of a tiny walnut,” he says.
The repeated operation in an American
The first step, according to the doctor, is first to “get inside a volume of such a small size”. “We had to go into the brain of a fetus in its mother’s womb and penetrate it using needles and different tools that could also cause damage,” adds the specialist. And the operation is a success.
Five weeks later, on October 15, Elodie gives birth to little Lisandro, without complications. Today, the 8-month-old baby is in perfect health. And this scientific breakthrough has allowed an American to benefit from the same treatment with her baby.
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