British and Belgian teams operated in utero on two fetuses suffering from a malformation linked to a defect in the closure of the neural tube in the lower back. A first in the UK.
Two unusual pregnancies… in the United Kingdom, two pregnant women underwent an operation last summer which was not directly intended for them: teams of doctors intervened to operate on their future child for a malformation linked to a defect in the closure of the neural tube in the lower back. One of these two patients, Bethan Simpson, chose to tell the story of this operation on Facebook, which was taken up by the British media. Tea Mirror.
A routine examination during her pregnancy reveals that her future granddaughter has spina bifida, a malformation that leaves part of the child’s spine exposed. Of varying severity depending on the type of the disease, spina bifida has consequences ranging from partial to total paralysis, including incontinence or serious disorders of the genital organs.
Prenatal surgery reduces the risks for the child
For a woman wishing to continue her pregnancy, there are two solutions. The first, still the most common, is to operate on the child to resolve this malformation just after birth. Nevertheless, as early as 2011, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that in utero interventions considerably reduce the risk of serious consequences of spina bifida. Bethan Simpson favored this option, after going through a battery of tests and analyzes to ensure that she and her child would support the operation.
For the first time in the UK, a team of 30 doctors from different hospitals and universities embarked on the intervention. Specialists from University College London and Great Ormond Street Hospital received support from a team from the University of Leuven (Belgium), which is at the forefront of this type of surgery.
As explained Professor Jan Deprest, all the difficulty of the operation consisted in opening the uterus in order to see the spinal column of the child, without triggering the delivery. Once the column in the open air, it was then “sufficient” to close the membrane above the spinal cord as well as the skin of the fetus. It is important to specify that the baby is, contrary to what certain media explain, never extracted from the uterus to carry out this operation. The images below bear witness to this.
Operations still recent in France
This method of prenatal intervention, developed in the United States, is still very recent in Europe. Thus in France, the first operation of this type only dates back to July 2014, in the Parisian Armand-Trousseau hospital.
Although this malformation is rare and affects only between 1 and 5 children in 10,000, the statistics provided by the network Eurocat show that the number of cases is not decreasing. On the contrary, it has even tended to increase in recent years.
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