Tiny baby discharged after world record surgery
A premature baby was discharged from Shanghai's Xinhua Hospital on Monday after doctors used a thoracoscope as small as a grain of rice to correct a congenital defect.
The boy, delivered at just 31 weeks, weighed one kilogram and was less than 30 centimeters long. He suffered frequent choking after birth and was suspected to have esophageal atresia, a defect where the upper and lower parts of the organ do not connect. This meant milk was unable to pass to the stomach properly.
The parents brought their son from Jiangsu Province to Shanghai's Xinhua Hospital, where experts immediately conducted diagnosis and treatment.
The baby, the size of an A4 sheet of paper, before surgery.
Dr Wang Jun said esophageal atresia was a serious congenital deformity in the digestive system with an incidence of one in every 3,500 to 5,000 births. Children with the defect usually had other congenital defects.
"Surgery is the major treatment for such a defect, however, birth weight and the impact of other defects are two criteria. The survival for mature children with no serious heart problems is over 95 percent, while mortality rises to 40 to 50 percent for children weighing less than 1,500 grams," Wang said. "Due to the baby's condition, we had to conduct surgery as soon as possible. It was challenging due to his low weight."
Surgery on the tiny baby took an hour and a half.
For mature children, minimally invasive surgery using a thoracoscope is the usual solution. Children of very low weight usually have to receive cut-open surgery or more than one surgery to reduce risk.
"The previous world record for the lowest weight of children with esophageal atresia was 1,025 grams. Cut-open surgery can impose serious trauma to the baby and is likely to cause developmental defects on the thorax while dividing the treatment into two surgeries can cause two injuries. To achieve the best benefit for the baby, we decided to challenge the record this time," he said.
After careful preparation and the cooperation of multiple teams, doctors conducted the surgery on December 4.
The baby was so small, the size of an A4 sheet of paper, that traditional medical equipment was too large for him, so doctors used the world's smallest thoracoscope, just 3 millimeters or the size of a grain of rice.
Surgery was completed in one and a half hours.
After treatment in the intensive care unit, the baby was disconnected from a respiratory machine. There were no complications after surgery and he managed to feed properly, with his weight rising to 2.9 kilos when he left hospital.
