Doctors successfully perform brain surgery on fetus in the womb

American doctors managed, in a precedent that is the first of its kind in the world, to perform an operation on the brain of a fetus in its mother’s womb, to treat a rare medical condition.

According to the US “United Press International” news agency, the case is known as “Vein Galleons Malformation” (VOGM), and experts said that the success of the surgery is an “exciting achievement.”

Surgeons at Boston Children’s Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts used a surgical technique to treat a congenital malformation known as “Gallen vein malformation”, which causes heart failure and stroke-like symptoms within days of birth.

Doctors were able to treat the deformity, which causes blood to flow too quickly through part of the brain, using ultrasound.

And Darren Auerbach, a neuroradiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, said that after the operation and birth, the infant did not suffer from blood flow, as it usually happens to those suffering from deformity.

Auerbach and his colleagues performed the operation on a fetus in the 34th week of pregnancy, and the baby girl was born two days later, because the operation leads to rupture of the membranes in the uterus, and the baby is born prematurely.

The infant was transferred to the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit for several weeks, during which time doctors continued to monitor her brain.

Auerbach stated that the infant is now in the sixth week, does not take any medications, eats normally and gains weight, and does not suffer any negative effects on her brain.

The doctors stated that the infant was monitored in the neonatal intensive care unit for several weeks before she was discharged from the hospital to the home, and indicated that during this period, the infant underwent a normal neurological examination and no clots, fluid accumulation or bleeding appeared in the MRI scans of the brain.

It is noteworthy that “VOGM” is a rare condition that occurs in one fetus out of 60,000, and is often discovered during a routine ultrasound in late pregnancy.

The condition appears when malformed arteries in the brain make a “wrong connection”. Instead of sending blood to the tiny capillaries that supply the brain and slow blood flow, the arteries connect directly to a larger vein, which drains blood from the brain to the heart.

Read also