“Delicate Brain Surgery on Unborn Baby: A Medical Breakthrough for Veine de Galen Detection”

The baby at birth. Photo: CNN

American doctors have performed for the first time a delicate operation in the brain of an unborn baby. The mother of the child named Kenyatta Coleman was 30 weeks pregnant when an abnormality was detected by doctors. They found that the child she was carrying had a vein in the brain. It is a malformation called Veine de Galen, which is often detected late in children. With this malformation, they have a high risk of not living beyond eleven years.

The baby girl was born healthy

In view of the seriousness of the situation, the doctors suggested that an intervention be performed on the child who was still in his mother’s womb. The operation, so delicate, took place for 20 minutes during the month of March. Two days later, the little girl named Denver was born healthy. Note that this is not the first time that doctors have performed an operation on a baby, who is still in his mother’s womb. In 2014, French doctors performed surgery on a baby in his mother’s womb. The child suffered from a congenital malformation.

The malformation, called spina bifida, affects the central nervous system and affects nearly one in a thousand pregnancies. If the little girl had not undergone this intervention, she would have suffered, according to several media, from brain abnormalities. In a statement, Professor Jean-Marie Jouannic declared that the operation “Consists of covering the externalized spinal cord by repairing the envelope which normally covers it with a suture, then suturing the baby’s skin. (…) This repair makes it possible to stop the leak of cerebrospinal fluid. The brain being thus protected, the intellectual development of children is improved..