6-yr-old boy undergoes rare brain surgery while sitting

New Delhi: A six-year-old boy from Mongolia successfully underwent a complex surgery, removing a tumour of more than five centimetre in size, from an inaccessible part of his brain.

The patient named Monkh, was suffering from bouts of headache and vomiting for a year.

The child, who underwent surgery, remained in sitting position for six hours and lay unconscious due to general anaesthesia given at the Sarvodaya hospital in Faridabad.

Kamal Verma, Head of Department, Neurosurgery and Spinal Surgery, who led the surgery, said, “When the case came to us, we examined the boy’s condition and realised that the only way we perform the surgery on his head was to place him in a sitting position throughout the procedure.”

“This was the only body posture that could have made it possible for us (doctors) to reach the tumour inside the brain with our medical instruments. The operation was an extremely risky one and any complication during surgery would have been fatal. All the risks were explained to the boy’s parents, and they agreed to go ahead to cure him of the tumour growing inside his head,” he added.

Verma extracted the tumour from the pineal region of the child’s brain.

The doctors in Mongolia discovered a tumour growing in the middle of the child’s brain, just behind the brain stem.

Tumours in this part of the brain, called the pineal region, are very difficult to access with medical instruments as it can block the channels of cerebrospinal fluid which surrounds and protects the brain.

Gaurav Kesari, Consultant Neurosurgery, said, “The complicated surgery was made possible with neuro-navigation, a computer-assisted technology which helped us navigate our way within the confines of the skull, and complete the entire procedure with precision in just six hours. The surgery was successful, and the boy was discharged after a few weeks from the hospital without any complications or problems.