It appears to work! Final week, a group in Switzerland shared information {that a} child boy had been born after his mom had the process. Child Lucien was the fifth child to be born after the surgical procedure and the primary in Europe, says Daniela Huber, the gyno-oncologist who carried out the operation. Since then, not less than three others have been born, provides Reitan Ribeiro, the surgeon who pioneered the process. They advised me the small print.
Huber’s affected person was 28 years previous when a four-centimeter tumor was found in her rectum. Medical doctors at Sion Hospital in Switzerland, the place Huber works, beneficial a course of remedy that included a number of drugs and radiotherapy—using beams of power to shrink a tumor—earlier than surgical procedure to take away the tumor itself.
This type of radiation can kill tumor cells, however it may additionally harm different organs within the pelvis, says Huber. That features the ovaries and uterus. Individuals who endure these remedies can choose to freeze their eggs beforehand, however the hurt prompted to the uterus will imply they’ll by no means be capable to carry a being pregnant, she provides. Harm to the liner of the uterus might make it troublesome for a fertilized egg to implant there, and the muscle tissues of the uterus are left unable to stretch, she says.
On this case, the girl determined that she did need to freeze her eggs. However it might have been troublesome to make use of them additional down the road—surrogacy is against the law in Switzerland.
Huber supplied her another.
She had been following the work of Ribeiro, a gynecologist oncologist previously on the Erasto Gaertner Hospital in Curitiba, Brazil. There, Ribeiro had pioneered a brand new kind of surgical procedure that concerned shifting the uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries from their place within the pelvis and briefly tucking them away within the higher stomach, under the ribs.
Ribeiro and his colleagues revealed their first case report in 2017, describing a 26-year-old with a rectal tumor. (Ribeiro, who’s now based mostly at McGill College in Montreal, says the girl had been advised by a number of medical doctors that her most cancers remedy would destroy her fertility and had pleaded with him to discover a strategy to protect it.)
