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Welcome To The Future: Fetal Surgery Is Real, And It’s Saving Lives

She wants Eric Church on the Pandora,” Dr. Michael Belfort told the team that was preparing a woman for surgery at Texas Children’s Hospital, in Houston.

The country music fan was Lexi Royer, who, 24 weeks and two days pregnant, was about to have her belly sliced open and her uterus lifted out (though still attached internally). It would then be drained of amniotic fluid, pumped full of carbon dioxide and pierced so tiny slits could admit a light, a camera and surgical tools.

The tools would be used to repair a severe spinal defect — spina bifida — in her unborn son. It is a disabling condition, and the hope was that the operation would give him better odds of being able to…

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3-D Printing Helping to Treat Unborn Babies with Fetal Abnormalities

Advancements in 3-D printing are entering the arena of fetal surgery - giving hope to unborn babies during procedures in which every second counts.

Advances in fetal surgery

Historically, the gold standard for the treatment of congenital malformations has been planned delivery at tertiary care center with attempted post-natal repair or amelioration of the lesion. Over the last few decades however, rapid advances in imaging and instrumentation technology combined with superior knowledge of fetal pathophysiology has led to the development of novel intrauterine interventions for most common fetal anomalies.

Fetal Surgery Gives Chance at Life

In fetal cardiac surgery, there are actually two patients: the mother and the baby. But the patient in the mother’s womb can’t be directly touched or seen. And because the baby is bobbing in amniotic fluid, it can’t be completely immobilized. Its heart is the size of a grape. The left ventricle, a frequent target of fetal cardiac interventions, is smaller than a raisin. Once the baby is correctly positioned for surgery—which can take as long as an hour—the procedure itself is usually over in 30 minutes.

Fetal surgery stands to advance from new glues inspired by mussels

Developing glues that work where it is wet has proved difficult. Other adhesives developed to date to help mend tissues cut during surgery do not work well enough to satisfy many surgeons. That’s where the common mussel, Mytilus edulis, muscles its way into consideration.

Lights, Camera and, Yes, Music: Reporting From the Operating Room as Doctors Perform Fetal Surgery

Operating rooms are usually kept cool, almost chilly. But not for fetal surgery. If the temperature is too low, the fetus’s heartbeat can slow down too much, so this operating room was pretty hot. When the photographer, Béatrice de Géa, and I were changing into scrubs in the women’s locker room, a nurse warned, “It’s going to be like a sauna in there.”

New Frontiers in Fetal Surgery

Not surprisingly, however, stepping into the womb is fraught with its own dangers and challenges- the first of which is painfully obvious. the patient is only six inches long - about one twelfth the size of a full-grown person - and weighs only about four ounces - about one-six-hundredth the weight of a full-grown person.

To Mend a Birth Defect, Surgeons Operate on the Patient Within the Patient

Spina bifida is generally not fatal, so the standard practice was to operate after birth. But the results of postnatal surgery were mixed: most children could not walk and had other problems. Doctors began to suspect that outcomes might be better if they could fix the defect before birth. Some of the spinal damage is caused by amniotic fluid, which turns increasingly toxic to the exposed nerve tissue as the pregnancy progresses and the fetus passes more and more wastes into the fluid.

Twice Born – Stories from the Special Delivery Unit

Step inside the groundbreaking medical frontier that is fetal surgery with Twice Born, a gripping PBS mini-series that takes an intimate, inside look at the Special Delivery Unit at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia where rare surgeries are done on babies still inside their mothers’ wombs.

UCSF Surgeon Reflects on Performing World's First Fetal Surgery 30 Years Ago

Often referred to as the “Father of Fetal Surgery,” Michael Harrison, MD, performed the world’s first open fetal surgery 30 years ago at UCSF, home of the first fetal treatment center in the United States.

Resources

Fetal Health Foundation

Fetal Health Foundation supports families receiving a fetal syndrome diagnosis, funds life-saving research, increases fetal syndrome awareness, and shares leading medical information on fetal syndromes.

Maternal-Fetal Surgery Network

The Maternal-Fetal Surgery Network was created to conduct a randomized clinical trial to evaluate in utero surgery versus standard post-natal surgery to repair myelomeningocele, the most severe form of spina bifida.

Spina Bifida Fetal Surgery

We are SpinaBifidaFetalSurgery.com. We're not doctors, nurses, or medical researchers. We're earn no money from this site. Our children have undergone fetal surgery (surgery before birth) for spina bifida. Surgeons operated to close their open backs where their spines and tissues failed to close early in the pregnancy.