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Ed Yeates reporting A Utah hospital has become one of only 15 centers in the country to offer a new kind of team-based surgery to save babies while they're still in the womb. The specialized care was announced today at St. Mark's Hospital in Salt Lake.
Up until now, San Francisco was the nearest center specializing in this kind of fetal medicine designed to save an unborn child inutero and in trouble, but not anymore.
This is the story of three mothers with five babies alive and doing well. Janis Hansen is about 23 weeks along. Her twins were risking death from an inutero circulation imbalance. It's called twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. But five weeks ago, doctors at St. Mark's used some of these miniaturized tools inside her uterus. Dr. Robert Ball, an expert in fetal medicine at St. Mark's Hospital says, "Now, we're using instruments where we can do the whole surgery through something that maybe is only two or three millimeters in size."
Once inside, a tiny precise laser was used to close off blood vessels causing the life threatening problem. Hansen says, "Both of them are growing. Both of their hearts are doing really well, and their organs look good as far as they can tell."
Anna Lynne Cole's 4-month-old baby is alive and well because the surgical team intervened while he was still in the womb. Anna lost one of her twins later but not from the surgery. She says, "But without the procedure, I would have lost them both long before I was able to hold them and love them and know them."
Libby Lewis has both her boys. In this case, the St. Mark's team used the miniaturized tools to correct an imbalance in the twins' amniotic fluid. "His amniotic fluid was immeasurable and then his brother's was so large, it was causing a number of problems too," Lewis says.
St. Mark's fetal surgeons will collaborate and train teams at other Mountain Star hospitals and universities across the country. For patients here and regionally, Dr. Belford, also a fetal medicine expert at St. Mark's Hospital, says, "I think that we could conceivably end up doing 100 to 200 of these procedures per year."
In all these surgeries, mothers are awake and under local anesthetic. They return home 12 to 24 hours after and they have normal vaginal deliveries instead of C-sections.
