Shanghai doctors help with case in Japan

Doctors from the Children’s Hospital of Fudan University took part in a long-distance consultation on Friday over the treatment of a 3-month-old baby girl born in Japan with congenital inflammatory bowel disease.

The girl, her Chinese parents’ third child, was born on June 4. But she began to suffer fevers, diarrhea and other symptoms before being hospitalized in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Osaka.

She later had serious dental ulcers and skin redness and was transferred to Kyoto University Hospital in mid-July. But treatment there seemed ineffective. 

Doctors confirmed she was suffering from early-onset inflammatory bowel disease due to a genetic mutation. There had been only four such cases in Japan and two of the patients had died.

The hospital had little experience of the disease and her parents wanted to take the girl back to China for treatment, but that wasn’t possible because of the coronavirus pandemic.

After an online search, the parents and doctors at the Japanese hospital found that the Children’s Hospital of Fudan University had experience in treating such diseases and they contacted the hospital to discuss the case.

Following their discussions, doctors from both countries decided an umbilical cord blood transplant would be the best treatment.

The Shanghai hospital had conducted the nation’s first successful umbilical cord blood transplant for a patient with the disease in 2015 and had also set the record of offering treatment for the youngest patient with the disease in the world.

To date, the hospital has carried out 60 stem cell transplant in some 100 cases and most patients recover well, officials said.

Ti Gong

Ti Gong