Patti's Blog - Advocate for Elders, People with Disabilities and Their Families

Groundbreaking Surgery for Girl Born Without Windpipe

Excerpt from: New York Times (click for full article)

 

Using plastic fibers and human cells, doctors have built and implanted a windpipe in a 2 ½-year-old girl — the youngest person ever to receive a bioengineered organ.

The surgery, which took place on April 9 here at Children’s Hospital of Illinois and will be formally announced Tuesday, is only the sixth of its kind and the first to be performed in the United States. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration under rules that allow experimental procedures when otherwise the patient has little hope of survival.

Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, a specialist in the field of regenerative medicine who developed the windpipe and led the complex nine-hour operation, said the treatment of the Korean-Canadian toddler, Hannah Warren, made him realize that this approach to building organs may work best with children, by harnessing their natural ability to grow and heal.

“Hannah’s transplant has completely changed my thinking about regenerative medicine,” said Dr. Macchiarini, a surgeon at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. He said he would like to proceed with a clinical trial in the United States, something that critics of his approach have called for.

Neuroinflammation may be behind general-anesthesia-associated learning disabilities

Excerpt from: Eurekalert (click for full article)

 

Several studies have found evidence that children who undergo repeated surgical operations with general anesthesia before the age of 4 may be at an increased risk for learning disabilities. In the March issue of Anesthesiology, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers report an animal study indicating that several factors – age, the specific anesthetic agent used and the number of doses – combine to induce impairments in learning and memory accompanied by the inflammation of brain tissue. An accompanying paper from the same team finds that the offspring of mice that received a specific anesthetic gas during pregnancy also showed the effects of neuroinflammation and impaired learning. Both articles have been released online.

"We found that different anesthetic drugs – sevoflurane but not desflurane – had different effects on neuroinflammation and on learning and memory function in young mice," says Zhongcong Xie, MD, PhD, corresponding author of both studies and director of the Geriatric Anesthesia Research Unit in the MGH Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine. "If they are confirmed by future studies in animals and humans, these findings would suggest that some anesthetics may be safer than others in young children and indicate ways to reduce risks."