The parents had “three options,” 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,” Marco Da Costa, Lisandro’s father, tells BFMTV, who suffers from a rare malformation, Galen’s aneurysm when he was just a fetus.
It is in the third ultrasound that Lisandro’s parents find out about the malformation suffered by their future son, who has only a 10% chance of survival, according to the doctors.
A brain the size of a “small walnut”
But the parents decide to try the operation in the womb. 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 its mother’s womb, but it is the first in the context of a vein of Galen aneurysm, a very rare malformation of the blood networks located in the brain that affects only about ten people per year.
Et si l’opération est délicate, c’est que le fœtus, âgé de 33 semaines à ce moment-là, “I weigh between 2.5 kilos and 2.7 kilos”, explained to BFMTV Olivier Naggara, the neuroradiologist who operated the baby. “His brain, and the malformation inside it, is the size of a small walnut,” he says.
Repeated operation on an American
The first step, according to the doctor, is to first “get inside a volume of such a small size.” “We had to enter the brain of a fetus in its mother’s womb and penetrate it with 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 gave birth to little Lisandro, without complications. Today, the 8-month-old baby is in perfect health. And this scientific advance has allowed an American to benefit from the same treatment with her baby.
Source: BFM TV
