Surgeons manage to operate on a severe brain malformation on a fetus

Surgeons at a French hospital successfully operated on a fetus with a serious brain malformation while still in its mother’s womb, a success already replicated by an American team, Paris hospitals announced on Friday. “An aneurysmal malformation of the vein of Galen was treated by embolization in utero” in September 2022, reported in a press release the AP-HP, an organization on which the main public hospitals in Île-de-France depend.

In this case, it was at the Parisian Necker hospital that surgeons performed this unprecedented operation, unveiled for the first time by the daily Le Parisien. The first does not consist in operating on a baby in its mother’s womb. Many operations of this type have already been performed in recent years, especially for malformations of the spinal cord.

But the intervention performed at Necker directly targeted the brain of the fetus. This one was suffering from a malformation of the vein of Galen, a cerebral blood vessel. However, this problem very frequently risks leading to the death of the newborn or, subsequently, to serious sequelae. The operation represented in itself high risks but it was proposed to the parents, in view of the virtual certainty of serious or fatal effects for the future child if the malformation had remained in the state.

The specificity of the operation also consists in its minimally invasive nature: “a microcatheter was positioned in the vein of Galen, through the skin and the uterus of the mother, then through the skull of the fetus”, explains the AP-HP. The operation went smoothly in half an hour and, above all, the child, now eight months old, is doing well.

Meanwhile, in the United States, surgeons performed a similar operation in a Boston hospital. This one, carried out in March also crowned with success, gave rise to a scientific publication, in the journal Stroke. “This approach represents a paradigm shift” in the face of this type of malformation, the researchers wrote, noting that such an operation makes it possible to intervene at an early stage and before irreversible complications.