A baby in the womb with the rare vein of Galen malformation disease was saved in a first-of-its-kind brain surgery.
The operation, performed by surgeons in Boston, was performed by slicing into the pregnant woman’s abdomen and using an ultrasound to identify the artery and guide the surgery.
The woman gave birth to a healthy child two days later, and he was born without birth defects.
The ten-strong- team of American doctors at the Boston Children’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital performed the brain surgery to treat the ‘meticulous’ rare blood vessel abnormality inside the brain, according to CNN.
The condition occurs when the blood vessel that carries blood from the brain to the heart doesn’t develop correctly.
The malformation results in an overwhelming amount of blood stressing the veins and heart and can lead to a cascade of health problems, reported the news outlet.
According to CBS News, Baby Denver was growing normally inside her mom when, on a routine ultrasound, doctors discovered she had this rare blood vessel abnormality inside the brain.
Many babies with this condition develop heart failure or brain damage and often don’t survive. In fact, Denver’s heart was struggling, and the malformation was getting dangerously large.
Doctors identified the malformation in the woman who was 34 weeks into pregnancy, using ultrasound guidance, a needle similar to those used for amniocentesis, and tiny coils that were placed directly into the abnormal blood vessels to stop blood flow.
‘Tremendous brain injuries and immediate heart failure after birth are the two big challenges,’ Dr. Darren Orbach, a radiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and expert in treating VOGM, told CNN.
Giving the details of the complication, he said that typically, infants are treated after they’re born using a catheter to insert tiny coils to slow down blood flow. However, the treatment often happens too late.
‘Despite advancements in care, 50 to 60 percent of all babies with this condition will get very sick immediately. And for those, it looks like there’s about a 40 percent mortality rate. About half of infants that survive experience severe neurological and cognitive issues,’ Orbach said.
The world’s first brain surgery took twenty minutes.
The surgery was documented in a case study published Wednesday in the American Heart Association’s journal Stroke.
